NEWS & LETTERS Theory/Practice 'Human Power is its own end'—Marx

Vol. 35 — No. 6 JULY, 1990 250

Two workers on today's bureaucrats

Editor's note: In the May issue of N&L we printed an article by Raya Dunayevskaya entitled "State-capitalism and the bureaucrats." Two of our worker-writers here comment on the todayness of this essay.

b y M a r t i n A l m o r a Raya Dunayevskaya's article was written in 1959. But

because there has not been any real positive change since—workers today are in the same situation or worse—it could have been dated 1989.

Dunayevskaya observed that the 1929 stock market crash was clearly the beginning of the modern retrogres­sion between mental and manual labor. It split the world mind in two—with state planners and managers on one side, along with the intellectuals who believed that the state and its bureaucracy had all the answers, and on the other side the "ordinary people" who sup­posedly weren't capable of serious thought.

SELLING WORKERS SHORT Under the subtitle "Intellectual and Labour Bureau­

crats," she critiqued sociologist C. Wright Mills and oth­ers who "indict various schools of social science for de­veloping a bureaucratic ethos and serve the military, government and business bureaucracies," yet they them­selves have no answers or basis for overcoming these bureaucracies. Their approach is that workers are una­ble to understand and change their situation in the world, so they must have an "intellectual leader" to guide them on the "road against bureaucracy."

To workers these approaches do not help. We work hard for inadequate wages with or without an "incentive." Whether you are treated well or not, you are working hard for very little, or you are out of work with no wage.

I have worked both ways and have received an incen­tive, a smile and a "job well done"; and for the same work have received the attitude that "your meager earnings are enough incentive, just get back to work." Either way I and my fellow workers were still producing more and more, working long hours, still tired and sore.

(continued on page 3)

Black World

Mandela— 2-way road to revolution?

b y L o u T u r n e r The historic 11 day, eight-city U.S. tour of African

National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela has evoked a new spirit of the two-way road to liberation between Black America and Black South Africa. Never before has a national liberation leader elicited such mass outpouring. And yet, as important as the hero sta­tus accorded Mandela for his unbroken spirit of resist­ance, following a 27-year prison ordeal, it is the present context of America's racial conflict into which Nelson Mandela has stepped which explains the unprecedented show of Black solidarity.

Black America demands a new image of itself as un­broken in revolutionary spirit as it perceives Mandela to be. All the protests and community outrage at the gnawing mdignities of this country's racism have been confined within the narrow limits proscribed by a politi­cally bankrupt Black leadership that has become but so many private agendas. Though Black leaders jostled each other for photo-opportunities with Mandela, there was little to assuage this whole post-Civil Rights era of unprincipled compromises and retrogression. F R E E D O M I D E A I N B L A C K T H O U G H T

Not since the martyred South African revolutionary thinker and activist, Steve Biko, has a Black world fig­ure of the stature of Mandela captured the spirit of Black self-determination among African-Americans. I t is the concept of a two-way road to revolution between the U.S. and Africa that Biko and Mandela summon from the recesses of American Black thought. This, not some vague notion of the lost heroism of American Black leadership, has elevated Mandela to world-histor­ic stature in the eyes of Black America.

Cynically viewed as nothing more than a voting bloc

(continued on page 10)

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1990-91

How to begin anew?

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M fl Eas t G e r m a n you th p ro tes t Communis t ru le . New Yorke r s welcome Mandela.

I. Superpower collusion, mass unrest and the pull of the "self-limiting revolution"

"While not exactly identical twins, these two-of-a-kind nuclear superpowers in their bi-polar world pair up at historic turning points, once it looks like someone other than they—like the people—are deter­mined to take fate in their own hands."

—Raya Dunayevskaya, 1987' Two totally irreconcilable "visions of the future" are

contending for the minds of humanity today. One is the effort of the rulers to project the exploitative, racist, sexist, class-ridden conditions we live under now as our permanent future. The other is the passion for freedom that upsurges from mass revolts and which finds its ful­lest expression in a philosophy of revolution.

At the moment, that passion for the Idea of Freedom is dramatically seen in the mass outpouring of Black America to greet the visit of Nelson Mandela. What is bringing masses of people into the streets to hear him in city after city has nothing to do with the agenda of the rulers, who are suddenly embracing Mandela while continuing to prop up the regime which jailed him for 27 years. The masses are turning out both to express their solidarity with the freedom struggles in South Af­rica and to put the spotlight on the horrendous living conditions here at home.

It is t he hunger for freedom—whether reflected in the outpour ing for Mandela's tour, or in the revolts in East Europe, or in the ceaseless underground op­position activities in China—that has the ru lers scur­rying to foist their narrow, exploitative "vision" of the future upon the minds of humanity.

Nowhere was that more starkly expressed than at the Bush-Gorbachev summit in June. Thus, shortly before the summit, Bush spoke of the need for a "new vision of Europe's future," spelling it out as, "Our enemy to­day is uncertainty and instability. The Atlantic alliance will need to maintain a sound, collective military struc­ture, with forces in the field, backed up by larger forces that can be called upon in a crisis." The emptiness of this so-called "vision" was matched by Gorbachev, who, shortly after the summit, spoke of the need for a "new vision of the Pacific's future" as he embraced South Korea's Roh Tae Woo, who has spent the past year brutally repressing the worker and student revolt in that land.

In total opposition to the "mind-forged manacles" of the rulers is the vision of the future projected by the Chinese students at Beijing University just as the sum­mit was ending on June 3. With incredible bravery they marched through the University denouncing the Li Peng regime, daring the soldiers to shoot them. The students were singing the Internationale, just as they did at the height of China's revolt of Spring, 1989.

The students insisted last year as the tanks rolled

into Tiananmen Square, "You Cannot Massacre an Idea!" Though the worker-student revolt there was driv­en underground, new revolts surfaced in East Europe only a few months later. In one revolt after another, masses of people forced the Berlin Wall open, drove from power one exploitative regime after another, and forced state-capitalism there to stop calling itself Com­munism. So sweeping were these revolts, that they helped bring forth a veritable transformation in world politics. Especially critical are the crises and revolts within the Russian empire, which raise the spectre of its possible dismemberment.

It is the ru lers ' fear of wha t they call the "persist­ent instabi l i ty" brought on by such revolts tha t drives them into each other 's a rms. Thus, at the Washington summit, Bush again tr ied to save Gorba­chev by offering him new t rade packages and an agreement to cut some now-obsolescent missiles, while allowing each superpower to develop a new generat ion of deadly nuclear weaponry. But it isn't only a question of Bush saving Gorbachev. At issue is the effort to create a whole new "era of coopera­t ion" between the superpowers . Indeed, Russia went so far as to propose a non-aggression pact between itself and the Western allies a t the J u n e 7 meeting of the Warsaw Pact in Moscow, held but days after the conclusion of the superpower summit.

Whether or not such a pact comes to pass, what is new in East-West relations was spelled out at that June 7 gathering, when the Warsaw Pact announced "the end of the idea of the West as our ideological enemy." For more than 50 years, Russian state-capitalism conducted its battle with the other pole of world capital—the U.S.—for global domination under the claim that it rep­resented an alternative social system. Gorbachev has now had to drop that ideological pretense. NATO in turn announced at its meeting in Turnbury, Scotland (also on June 7) that it needs to "define itself as the partner of the Warsaw Pact" rather than as its adver­sary.

This is hardly the first time rulers have tried to tem­porarily put aside their differences in order to buy time for getting their own houses in order. As Fareed Zakaria

(continued on page 5)

1. See Raya Dunayevskaya's "Two of a Kind: Reagan and Gorbachev and Their Bi-Polar World," in Supplement to the Raya Dunayev­skaya Collection, Vol. 13, #11125.

On the Inside Marx's 1841 Thesis as a philosoph­ic new beginning—From the Writ­ings of Raya Dunayevskaya . . . p 4 Racism at national women's conference p 2 Homeless youth in America. . . p 11

Page 2 NEWS. & L E T T E R S 4ULY, t990

Racism splinters women's conference Global women's meeting b y T e r r y M o o n

Twelve frustrating years of women of color fighting the administration of the National Women's Studies As­sociation (NWSA) came to a head June 20-24 in Akron, Ohio. There the Women of Color Caucus truly did "Call the Question"—and it wasn't the question the NWSA planners had in mind when they named this 12th annu­al conference, attended bv close to 2,000 women, "Fe-

News & Letters photo

minist Education: Calling the Question." Rather, U.S. Black, Native American, Middle Eastern, African and Asian women demanded that NWSA not only face up to its racism, but DO something about it.

The racist straw that broke the camel's back was the firing of Ruby Sales, the only woman of color in NWSA's national office. The refusal of the adminis­tration of NWSA to reinstate her, or create a new Steering Committee to be at least 50% women of col­or, or to address any of the grievances of the Women of Color Caucus was compounded by its refusal to inform the membership of NWSA of any of its deci­sions or problems regarding racism.

When it was crystal clear that nothing would change, the Women of Color Caucus rose as one and walked out of an NWSA plenary chanting, "This is our response to racism!" They vowed to constitute themselves "as a tru­ly democratic body giving voice to women of color from all races, nationalities and perspectives from around the world." As one very angry Black woman said, if the Women of Color Caucus's demands are not met, "We will bleach this organization!"

REVOLUTIONARY ROOTS ABANDONED What makes the continuing racism of NWSA deeply

disgusting is the revolutionary beginnings of that organ­ization. NWSA always considered itself the "intellectual arm of the Women's Liberation Movement" and has prided itself on being multi-dimensional. As the press release from "The Former Women of Color Caucus, NWSA" pointed out, "Our break from NWSA is indeed unfortunate, given that it is an organization that claims to be feminist and which advertises that 'it owes its ex­istence to the movement for the liberation -of all women free from all the ideologies and institutions that have consciously or unconsciously oppressed and exploited some for the advantage of others.' "

These were supposed to be the principles that gov­erned NWSA. Why weren't they carried through? Could it be that the NWSA leadership, as well as some of its members, don't want to fight for those principles? Do they consider them Utopian? Has the NWSA administration accepted the ground of this al­ienating, racist, sexist society, rather than taking on the challenge to transform it? In short, has NWSA become a giant private enclave to women in acade-mia—most of them white—who just want to make it big in the university and perhaps dabble in women's studies on the side or use it to further their own ca­reers?

NWSA has moved so far from its beginnings in the Women's Liberation Movement that the leadership re­fuses to let its own membership in on any of the prob-

News & Letters Vol. 35 — No. 6 JULY, 1990

News & Letters (ISSN 0028-8969) is published 10 times a year, monthly, except bi-monthly January-February and August-September for $2.50 a year (bulk order of five or more — 15<t) by News & Letters, 59 East Van Buren, Rm. 707, Chicago, IL 60605. Telephone (312) 663-0839. Second Class postage paid at Chicago, Illinois. POST­MASTER: Send address changes to News & Letters, 59 East Van Buren, Rm. 707, Chicago, IL 60605.

Raya Dunayevskaya, Chairwoman, National Editorial Board (1955-1987)

Charles Denby, Editor (1955-1983)

Olga Domanski, Peter Wermuth, Co-National Organizers, News and Letters Committees

Eugene Walker, Managing Editor Mike Connolly, Marxist-Humanist Archivist

Felix Martin, Labor Editor

N e w s & Letters is printed in

• , •' " .< / . ' 9 unionshop. ,

lems or decisions of the organization. When the Nation­al Director got up to try and defend herself, she rev­ealed just how far NWSA had traveled from any revolutionary roots by saying, "I want an organization where debate and decisions are not made in such a large forum." She was booed off the stage.

RACISM/ELITISM IN NWSA So disgusting and dangerous is that attitude that in

the workshop, "We Shall Remember Women's Partici­pation in the Democracy Movement in China," one of the Chinese presenters said that the leadership of NWSA reminded her of the Chinese government. It was this workshop that developed a petition demanding an assembly for all the membership to discuss the racism of NWSA. The NWSA administration would allow no such meeting.

That NWSA does represent where a segment of the women's movement is, can be seen in the discussion going on in these pages. In the June 1990 issue of News & Letters, Black writer and activist Gloria Joseph wrote in disgust of Vivian Gornick's self-absorbed article in the April 15 New York Times Magazine titled "Who Says We Haven't Made a Revolution?" Gloria Joseph wrote in part:

"The new beginnings should have been an active part of the WLM (Women's Liberation Movement) 20 years ago. From the onset of the second wave of feminism it was obvious that the direction of the movement was designed to exclude certain women. For the past 20 years Black women and a scattering of white women have been crying out for the need to examine the role of working class and Black women in history, in order to write philosophy for the pres­ent."*

Those "new beginnings" in the struggle for freedom are long overdue. This is our movement. The pages of News & Letters are open to continue this very impor­tant discussion. * Gloria Joseph wrote in response to an essay by Olga Domanski, "A Look at 20 Years: Women's Liberation and the Search for New Begin­nings." To receive a copy of Domanski's essay and responses from Glo­ria Joseph, Vivian Gornick and Maya Morrison, send $1.00 to News & Letters, 59 E. Van Buren, Room 707, Chicago, IL 60605.

Lesbians & Gays march New York, N.Y.—On Sunday, June 24, I was one

of an estimated 200;000 marchers, representing approxi­mately 300 different groups, in the 21st Annual Gay and Lesbian Pride March. Throngs of spectators estimated at 120,000 cheered, applauded and waved placards for our march from Columbus Circle down Fifth Avenue, through Greenwich Village—a proud, loving, vibrant commemoration of Homosexual Rights.

Some marchers responded to a small group of protest signs—"Perverts," "I shall not allow science to find a cure for AIDS," "Excommunication Now"—with cries of "Shame, Shame" and "You should fear the hate in your souls, not the love in our hearts."

We experienced a dramatic and sad moment of si­lence (punctuating the otherwise animated, music-ing atmosphere) holding our hands aloft with our pink wrist bands, inscribed with names of friends, com­rades and lovers who had died of AIDS. I was deeply moved with the notion and sense of 'Total Freedom" (actually one of the banners).

This "largest so far" of Gay and Lesbian Pride Marches felt like a New Beginning. Here are the many thousands of us—Gays, Lesbians and supporters—creat-

&30PM V June 24,1990

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ing a personal and mass cohesiveness. Here is a small revolution against decades and centuries of discrimina­tion, oppression and persecution.

This is a clear statement of the concrete and a sym­phony of cognition. Blacks, Hispanics and others pro­claimed pride—^not only in their sexual identity—but ra­cially and nationally. As one of the banners read: "We dare to be different." We all dared—Heterosexuals as well as Homosexuals—to march and speak and act against the social order and for liberation.

—Sheila G.

Support feminist center Boston, Mass.—On June 7, red balloons, carrying

the message "Support a Women's Center," broke up the sea of black-gowned Harvard University graduates and revealed that antiquated ideas and institutions persist in more than quaint traditions of Latin oration and songs at the commencement of the most prestigious university in the U.S. Besides balloons the Undergraduate-Gradu­ate Women's Center Committee also passed out bright red flyers outlining a ten-year effort to create a wom­en's center and the lack of support by Radcliffe College President Lynda S. Wilson.

Because "we tried to work within the administration all year and got nowhere," as one Committee member put it, the Committee began a petition drive just days before school ended and collected over 1,000 signatures. -They will resume their work in the fall and have urged alumnae to support their" efforts. ..

The students want a Women's Center to coordinate resources, be a base for politics, advocacy and social change and create community among all women: stu­dents, faculty and staff at Radcliffe College and Har­vard University. . . . . . .

" ' —Radcliffe alumna

New York, N.Y.—The presence of over 1,800 women from all over the world, including hundreds from the Third World, made the 4th International In-terdteciplihary Congress on Women held at Hunter Col-, lege June 3-7, quite an exciting experience. At a time when women's studies and women's daily struggles seem increasingly far apart in this country, what impressed me the most about this conference was the attention to social change that pervaded many sessions.

A panel on "International Unionization and Women," for example, brought together academics and activists from several different countries reporting on: Asian women working in the. electronics and garment industry in California, Korean women workers at the Tandy Cor­poration in the export zone, and Palestianian women's wage labor since the intifada.

The one formal plenary session, "Progress of Patri­archy with New Faces? Women and the East Europe­an Revolutions," brought home that even this kind of international context does not resolve the tensions within women's studies and the women's movement regarding the meaning of liberation.

Suzanna Szelenyi, a 24-year-old newly elected to the Hungarian parliament, traced the genesis and growth of her Federation of Young Democrats, but admitted that it still has no platform on women's issues. Olga Lipoz-skaya from Russia, critiqued Gorbachev's glasnost. She described the rise of violence against women, on the one hand, and the emergence of small women's organiza­tions, on the other. And Petra Kelly, the West German Greens leader, brought out ominous aspects of German reunification such as unemployment, racism, increased militarization, and curtailed abortion rights.

A dispute immediately erupted during the discus­sion, when some of the Third World women present expressed anger over the speech by the American commentator, Joanne Landy. A Palestinian woman attacked the chauvinism she saw in the call to "aid," rather than have solidarity with, the East Europeans. A U.S. feminist, Blanche Weisen Cooke, demanded discussion on how the warming of East/West rela­tions will hurt Third World liberation movements.

But no speaker critiqued the "free market economy" being pursued now and none of the speakers voiced a need toi uproot the state-capitalism which had prevailed under the name Communism. Therefore the pathways posed for women involved a liberal humanism without revolution, and without asking, "What is genuine Marx­ism?" Ultimately, this is what separated the panel from liberation movements in the Third World, or in any country^ where women's liberation has raised deep no­tions of freedom. :—Laurie Cashdan

Women-Worldwide

by Mary Jo Grey

Despite growing national support for a woman's free­dom to choose, two recent government actions tear away more of our long-fought-for rights. On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can force teen-age women to notify both parents before obtaining an abortion—regardless of whether the parents have ever lived with her, have custody of her, or are even abusive; One day later, the Louisiana legislature out­lawed-all abortions, except those necessary to save the life of the mother.

More than 800 women workers in Thailand are on strike; against the Par Garment Company for shutting down the factory rather than improve poor working conditions. The women—most from 17-25 years-old— had sent a petition to management demanding: more se­cure employment, higher wages (daily pay is less than $3), health care service, transportation, dropping the ban on trade unions, better ventilation and sufficient drinking water.

—Information from Asia Link

More than two-thirds of the student body of Yale Uni­versity Law School in New Haven, Conn., have signed a petition demanding that feminist legal theorists be hired as full time faculty members. Drafted by the Students for Feminist Scholars, the petition cited the need for women teachers to "affirm the viewpoints and experi­ences of women of color, of lesbians, married women, woman with children, and all women in this communi-ty-" :

Information from Gay Community News

Education for women is under attack by women-hating government and religious leaders. The Japanese Finance Minister's suggestion that the government rethink its policy of promoting college education for women be­cause it contributes to lowering the birth rate, was met by "strong fury among Japanese women." In Pakistan, 80 Islamic clerics publicly condemned all education for women except in "Islamic texts and roles." They ponti­ficated that: "a woman must not go out without her husband's permission; laugh when speaking; wear per­fume;, speak .to strangers;, look, fi% men, with 'a, sexual sens|i/.or wear clothing that rustles."

JULY, 1990 N f - W S '&' L E T T E R S Page^S'

A worker's alternative in Mexico Editor's note: Below we print excerpts from an inter­

view we conducted in Mexico with organizers in the Au­thentic Front of Workers (FAT), which defines itself as "a: national organization of working men and women, united, plural, democratic, independent." It is both a trade union and a socio-political organization.

Mexico City, Mexico—Since 1982 we have had major social problems resulting from the devaluation of the peso. Conditions began to worsen in Mexico due to the drop in the price of oil, corruption within Mexico and anti-Mexican attitudes among the powerful coun­tries who have been taking Mexico's natural resources. Since 1982 wages have dropped, there has been a lack of work, and international debt has skyrocketed.

MODERNIZATION AND MISERY The malnutrition of children and youth in Mexico is

even worse than in Brazil. From the presidency of De la Madrid forward all have pursued a project of "modern­ization." But developing this project on an international level has meant the exploitation of natural and human resources, all in the interests of the capitalists without concern for the social cost to the people of Mexico.

There is a dissatisfaction on the part of workers with regard to their wages. They demand respect for their dignity as human beings, for the collectivity of the mas­ses as expressed in the factory, in the schools, in the streets. The government reacted to these demands by developing an economiCT>act signed by business leaders and by the supposed representatives of the people. The most recent pact is an extension of the pact of 1987. Each new pact is further removed from the people.

At this date the decisions for the future of Mexico are determined by 300 men: the government, and the capitalists who corrupt and manipulate the union leaders and the organization of unions.

Today, in 1990, to ask for work that is guaranteed is a revolutionary demand; to demand the minimum to support your family is a revolutionary demand.

FORMED AS ALTERNATIVE The FAT, formed in response to the dissatisfaction of

workers as expressed in the schools, the factories, and the streets, was an alternative to the so-called workers' groups which are co-opted by the government and busi­nesses. A group of people decided to start a true work­ers' union, run by and for workers. We call ourselves the Authentic Workers Front.

It is now a national workers' organization which pro­vides information and support and helps form unions in a variety of sectors. Our concept of work is broader than just industrial labor, and includes the agricultural worker as well as the housewife, who is an essential participant in production since her labor in the home

Meatpackers and

public as guinea pigs Oxford, England—Mad cow disease is ravaging

Britain's cattle herds. The government has taken some measures to lessen the risk. The processing of sheep of­fal into cattle feed (believed to be the origins of the dis­ease) has been banned, as has the use of cattle brains, spinal column and intestines for human consumption. Infected animals must be slaughtered, and the carcasses burned.

Now the agricultural minister, John Gummer, is trying to convince everyone that "British beef is per­fectly safe." The truth is that there is an unknown de­gree of risk to workers in meat-processing and to con­sumers. It 's not even known whether the disease is car­ried by a virus or some other organism. We don't know whether humans can get the disease, or whether meat is made safe by cooking.

Meat processing workers should get the best objective scientific advice and insist on adequate health and safe­ty precautions. The same goes for the meat-eating pub­lic. Instead, the Tory government is serving up propa­ganda aimed at securing the meat industry profits.

If I ever write in praise of Margaret Thatcher, you will recognize the first symptoms...

—Richard Bunting

Tied to hospital clock Los Angeles, Cal~l have recently graduated

from college and entered the labor field as a medical worker in a hospital. Albeit not a production or factory job, I still have felt capitalism rear its ugly head ever more forcibly over my life.

I work against numbers daily. Our quality of work is surely measured, but on a day-to-day basis it's the quantity that counts. Productivity is key. To keep the numbers up, one cannot "waste" time in talking with patients who may just be frightened and in need of someone to take the time to talk with them, as they face the frightening medical delivery system.

We are discouraged from seeking fellow employees with whom to talk, as we too face the frightening re­ality of this medical delivery system. Almost as if tied to the machines of automation, we a re tied to the hands of the clock, and how that t ranslates into dollars for the company. We are "encouraged" to pass our t ime in chargeable activities.

"Overworked" is no longer judged by how frazzled and stressed employees become by trying to see so many patients in one day. Rather, only if the numbers show you are correct in your claim can opening another position" be considered, and thus your workload becomes more manageable. —Woman" health care Worker

keeps the workers physically able to do their jobs, and since she also depends on their income.

The FAT originators proposed as a primary goal the development of the workers towards an understanding of their reality: the situation in their country, the roles of the government, the businessmen and the means of production, the roles assigned to work and the workers, so as to study, analyze, discuss and come up with pro­posals for change.

We ask : Wha t is t he union? What is i ts function? How do we work out i ts s t ructural function, as well as i ts class role in a capitalist society? And how else can worke r s develop besides peti t ioning for higher wages? Now t h a t is not enough. After a s t r ike against a factory owner who has not paid his work­ers, he m a y abandon the factory. So the workers ap­propr ia te the factory and materials , and take over production. So now we are involved in helping work­ers administer factories and money in cooperatives in addition to union work.

We also work with the "colonias," or shantytowns, who represent themselves in struggles for land to live on and for funding to rent and build "homes" with elec­tricity and possibly some running water. And we work with the campesinos, who are also trying to maintain a stable place to live and work.

Each group we work with has its own structure and way of coming to conclusions regarding its own particu­lar concerns. The idea is always for them to develop "from below." We propose to transform this society to one that is more just, more humane, and more demo­cratic, one that is socialist and self-directed.

Now off the press directly from Mexico

the new expanded Spanish edition of

Raya Dunayevskaya's

Marxism and Freedom

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o r d e r from News & Let te rs

Pepperoni with extra sweat Chicago, III.—The new plant manager at Eckrich

plant # 6 in Chicago held meetings with each depart­ment after he arrived. He told us that this facility could not make it as a hot dog plant, but that we had to "prove ourselves worthy" before the company would be willing to introduce new product lines here.

He said he would establish goals for each department and, when we met or exceeded the goal, we would be rewarded with pizza lunches, chicken and ribs, maybe even t-shirts or sweat shirts. The goal set for the bun-size line was 72,000 pounds in an eight-hour shift or 706 boxes per hour.

At the same time a number of the people on the bun-size line, as well as some of the maintenance men, were arguing that the line would run better if we slowed it down. Someone must have heard us, because the speed was turned down, and we did have fewer breakdowns, jam-ups and bad packages. The machine ran more con­tinuously, and we started exceeding 700 boxes for two, three or four hours per shift. People were exhausted.

That intensification of labor wasn't enough for Eck­rich, though. The amount of meat scheduled for each day was increased and, with that, the speed of the ma­chine inched upward again. The number of breakdowns, jam-ups and bad packages, and the amount of time re­quired to clean up the mess at the end of the night also increased.

The first shift exceeded the goal by more than 3,000 pounds one Friday, the first day that the speed of the line was raised again. The company thinks: if they can do it one day for pizza, they can do it every day. But we can't—not under these conditions. And some of us think we're fpols for even trying. . , . . . . . ,

' ' ' ' ' —Frus t r a t ed Eckrich;worker

Workshop Talks (continued from page 1)

Where is the help from the union officials when these things are going on? To most workers they are nothing but bureaucratic leeches who also offer "to guide us,'* yet all they are doing is Slicking the dues directly frotti^ us to maintain their bureaucratic ways. We don't heed this type of "guidance."

TWO WORLDS IN EACH COUNTRY Under "Automation and the Scientist-Philosopher,"

Dunayevskaya points out that each country was and is divided into two worlds. In one world are those that have taken the creative power of science and have turned it into tools of destruction such as automation in the work place, where the machine is the destroyer of workers, and the nuclear arsenal of the state, where weapons are the destroyer of the planet. And of course in the other world are the people who have no control over this horrible situation.

And yet we still have scientist-philosophers, like the Norbert Wiener Dunayevskaya wrote about, who still look to pure science for a way out of this man-made threat, but do not look to all of humanity to lead us from the destruction that only a few have created.

Again, from my own personal experience, I have felt the degradat ion of working for a machine that allows no t ime for enjoying life. As well, everyone h a s the th rea t of nuclear destruction on their minds.

The section of Dunayevskaya's article subtitled "Atti­tudes to Automation" reads like today because you still have intellectual bureaucrats telling us that automation is safe and beneficial to the economy while workers still know that automation is unsafe and detrimental to all who must work with it.

Dunayevskaya is positively right when she states that the road against bureaucracy is the wrong road if it doesn't include the concrete attitudes of workers and all mankind along with the intellectuals.

•

b y E u g e n e F o r d In May, 20,000 Hyundai shipyard workers in South

Korea went on a sit-down strike to protest the jailing of three labor leaders. I t lasted for three days until crushed by the military. Workers then took to the streets in protest. The movement spread to the nearby Hyundai auto plant, where more than 20,000 demon­strated their solidarity with the shipyard workers.

The battle being waged by workers in South Korea brings to mind the type of struggle it took to organize the CIO in this country. But as high a point as the building of the CIO was in the 1930s, something allowed labor to slip backwards after World War II.

Looking at labor a t the beginning of the 1990s, both at a high point like South Korea and at the dif­ficulties faced here in the U.S. after a decade of Reaganism, made me appreciate very much Raya Dunayevskaya 's article on "State-capitalism and the bureaucra t s . " Her section called "Intellectuals and Union Bureaucra t s " illuminated the capitalists ' push to control workers ' th inking th rough intellectuals.

The intellectuals graduated to become bureaucrats for a state machine; these intellectuals became "prize fight­ers" to defend capital against labor. The labor bureau­crats tried to beat back labor, and make the worker submit to the drive for production, as if progress only meant more and more production to keep up with the competition. In truth all that speed-up meant working yourself out of a job.

With the Great Depression and the coming of the age of state-capitalism the intellectual was transformed "from the sphere of culture and consumption to that of plan and production." But in the 1930s one had the re­volt of the "worker with thoughts of his own to resolve the totality of the modern crisis through workers' con­trol of production." This took on many organizational forms with the CIO, with "spontaneous actions centered at the point of production."

UNION VS. WORKERS' CONTROL By the 1950s with the development of automation,

the union bureaucrat ignored the voice of the rank and file, and joined with the bosses in helping to control workers and to take any control of production out of their hands. The labor bureaucrats have used "water to put out the fire" of any new labor movement by the rank and file which would threaten their positions.

This retrogression by the union is reflected in how the company has transformed the strike, a weapon used for labor, into a weapon to defeat labor in the 1980s. Management has strike-breaking scabs lined up to re­place striking workers, and with the same blow tries to get rid of the union for good.

In the 1980s and now the 1990s this has meant ac­cepting no-strike pledges, two and three-tier wage sys­tems, extension of the length of the working day that locks many workers permanently out of jobs.

Today, there is a need for labor to create new or­ganizational beginnings. But it is not jus t a new form of organizat ion t ha t has t o be created, bu t a bat t le of ideas has to be waged in the labor movement today, because mili tant action alone is not enough. We need to create ground for defending the voice of labor, a voice which is seldom heard.

This battle of ideas has to be against the old union bureaucrats who do not recognize the power of workers' thoughts. It needs to be waged together with a different kind of intellectual who has not become a bureaucrat— intellectuals who want to join with workers in waging a battle of ideas, trying tp , create, .a vision, a philosophy that can help to create 'new organizational beginnings that wc*ft be allowed to fall backwards.

.Page-4 N E W S & L E T T E R S -JULY,v1'990

From the writings of Ray a Dunayevskaya

Marxist-Humanist Archives by Raya Dunayevskaya

Founder of Marxist-Humanism

Editor's note: The letter printed below was written by Raya Dunayevskaya to Charles Denby on May 5, 1981— Marx's birthday. This discussion of "beginning the part of the book on Marx in 1841" follows her intensive 1980-81 research and writing on Marx's 1841 doctoral thesis for what became Chapter 9 of Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution* It is included in the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection in the form in which it was first published in News & Letters in June, 1981, as Dunayevskaya's "Theory/Practice" column (microfilm #7476) titled "A 1981 view of Marx's 1841 dia­lectic." Some of Dunayevskaya's research notes on Marx's 1841 thesis are included in the Supplement to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (#14447-14466).

Charles Denby was editor of News & Letters and au­thor of Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal. Much of the three-decades-long dialogue between Dunayev­skaya and Denby, including their 1953 discussions of the meaning of Stalin's death—written up by Dunayevskaya as "Then and Now" (#2184)—is also included in the Collec­tion.

May 5, 1981 Dear CD:

I'd like to discuss with you the reason for my begin­ning the part of the book on Marx in 1841 rather than 1843. The latter is the usual starting point for analyzing Marxism since that is the year Marx broke from bour­geois society. I find the year 1841 especially exciting be­cause there we see Marx as a revolutionary before ever he developed a totally new body of ideas—a whole new continent of thought and of revolution we know as Marx's Marxism. We become witness to him speaking to himself so to speak. In preparing his doctoral thesis on ancient Greek philosophy, specifically Epicurus and De-mocritus, we become witness to the fact that, despite his erudition and concentration on Greek philosophy, what preoccupies him is the reality of Germany, 1840, the great irresolvable contradiction between Hegel's Ab­solute Idea and Prussian reality.

TO THE EXTENT to which 1841 was mentioned at all by Marxists, it was simply to show that, even in the realm of thought and even when Marx himself was still a Hegelian, he "deviated" from Hegel's analysis of those Greek philosophers. What, however, is of the es­sence, as his Notebooks rather than just the thesis show, is truly phenomenal: Marx is actually probing heretofore unprobed depths of consciousness as well as of reality:

"While philosophy has sealed itself off to form a con­summate, total world.... The world confronting a philos­ophy total in itself is therefore a world torn apart... He who does not acknowledge this historical necessity must be consistent and deny that men can live at all after a total philosophy." (p.491)1

Naturally, it isn't Epicurus and Democritus that in­terests us, but how Marx, in writing on that, was having

Marx's 1841 thesis as a philosophic new beginning

* A new edition of this work is being published by the Univer­sity of Illinois Press in 1991. 1. Both the Notebooks and the doctoral thesis on Epicurus and Democritus are quoted from Karl Marx, Frederick En-gels: Collected Works, Volume I, International Publishers, 1975. The disparity in the pages in these two works is due to the fact that, whereas the thesis, pp. 25-108, appears in Sec. 1, the Preparatory Materials, i.e., Notebooks (pp. 403-515) do not appear till the end of the volume.

Karl Marx in his student years.

his eyes fixed on and opposing the German reality of his day. As a young Hegelian he is asking himself: where is humanity heading? And it is this which leads him to the conclusion to break with the bourgeoisie as he begins his struggle against Prussian censorship, and feels the urgency to oppose the status quo. He starts to engage in "Ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless in the sense that the criticism is neither afraid of its own results nor of confronting the powers that be."

Clearly, what is tugging at the young Marx in reality and in thought is something in the air—revolution. The key word for the young Marx is history. The contempo­rary history which was pulling at the student Marx was in his thesis stated as if it were only the history of thought, but the non-muted form in which it was es-pressed in his so-called Notebooks makes it clear that it was actual history—the crisis in contemporary Germany in reality as well as in thought. And because that was so, it was both Hegel and the Left Hegelians (of whom he was one) that Marx was breaking from. His point was that it is insufficient simply to show that the mas­ter (Hegel) had accommodated himself to reactionary reality. One must analyze the accommodation not mere­ly to expose it, but in order thereby to discover the ina­dequacy of the philosophical principle which compelled that accommodation. Only in that wav could the cri-

As the East European Communist regimes disintegrate... As the Russian Empire begins to unravel...

...Take a journey through the Archives of Raya Dunayevskaya The one Marxist philosopher who both anticipated the four-decade long struggle against state-capitalism calling itself Communism and who projected a challenge to the freedom movements to work out the unity of philosophy and revolution.

Follow her studies on the nature of the Rus­sian economy unseparated from her discovery of Marx's "Humanist Essays:"

• Russia as State-Capitalist Society (1942-3, 1947); The original historical analysis, based on an exhaustive study of conditions of labor and Russia's first five-year Plans. (See The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, VoL 7, #4760.)

• Labor and Society (1941); the essay in­tended as the introduction to her state-capi­talist analysis, which was rooted in Marx's Capital and in what later became known as Marx's 1844 Humanist Essays. (See The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, VoL I, #87).

Her tracing of the revolts in East Europe unseparated from the working out of a philo­sophic expression of freedom:

• The Beria Purge (1953); Dunayevskaya's analysis of the changes in Russia following Stalin's death, which concludes, "we have reached the beginning of the end of Russian totalitarianism." (See The Raya Dunayev­skaya Collection, VoL III, #2200.)

• "State-Capitalism and the East Europe­an Revolts" in Philosophy and Revolution (1973); traces out the dialectic of revolt from East Germany, 1953, to the Hungarian Revolution, 1956, to Prague Spring, 1968, and Poland's 1970 revolt.

Her writings of the 1980s on state-capitalism's degeneracy:

• "Andropov's Ascendency reflects final stage of state-capitalist degeneracy" (1982);, Dunayevskaya's analysis of the rise to pow­er of Gorbachev's mentor, Andropov. (See Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, Vol. XI, #7411.)

• "A Post-World War II View of Marx's Humanism, 1843-83; Marxist Humanism, 1950s-1980s"; (1987); Dunayevskaya's retro­spective-perspective of the movements from practice and from theory of the post-World War H age. (See Supplement to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, Vol. 13, #11588.) Write to News & Letters for a listing of librar­

ies holding her Archives, as well as for information on how to get the library in your area to order them.

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tique produce an advance in knowledge which would create the possibility of a new beginning.

MARX HELD THAT because Hegel's philosophy wasn't the unity of reason and reality which it claimed to be—the present period of crisis revealed the total di-remption of the two separate totalities. Reality and Reason confronted each other hostily: "This duality of philosophical self-consciousness appears finally as a dou­ble trend, each side utterly opposed to the other." (p. 86)

Discerning the inadequacy in both Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Marx was heading, his Notebooks re­veal, toward both attacking philosophy and opposing re­ality. He turned first to a search for what he called a new "energizing principle," as he wrote: "It is a psycho­logical law that the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy...but the practice of philosophy is itself theoretical. It is the critique that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." (p. 85)

The question that Marx kept asking himself is: where and how to begin anew both in philosophy and in trying to transform reality. The new^beginning that Marx had worked out over the next two to three years was noth­ing short of a whole new continent of thought and of 1 revolution. For, as he left the academic world and be- j came a journalist, a revolutionary journalist, he was at once engaged both in battles with Prussian censorship , and the legal system, specifically the laws on wood theft, taking, instead, the part of the rebellious peas­ants. Just as revolutionary journalism led to a break with the bourgeoisie and its state, so the Philosophic-Economic Essays led in 1844 to a new world view—"a new Humanism"—and a new concept of revolution— proletarian revolution.

WHAT I FOUND most exciting about that year, 1841, is to see the idea while it is germinating rather than when it is already a conclusion. The process of breaking, moreover, is what shows, at one and the same time, what is old and what is new-born, not as just "in­fluences," but discontinuous with old: the great divide in historic age. And what sets off one age from another both as birth-time of history and of philosophy are those breaking-points of departure from old which point to the direction forward. ,

It is: true that Marx would not work out that new be­ginning until he had broken with bourgeois society as he had already in 1841 broken with religion and Prus­sian I censorship, and until he discerned the working class! as Subject. But, philosophically, there is no doubt where he was headed, as he contrasted practice to theo­ry and developed his most original interpretation of \ praxis. That was to remain his unique category for breaking both with "idealism" and "materialism."

Finally, can I confide in you something that may sound fantastic: may I ask you whether you see any re­lationship between the questions that preoccupied Marx . in 1841 to what has been happening in our age in the early years of the 1950s? You remember, I am sure, two very different events in the early 1950s that would dis­close, at one and the same time, the new-stage of prod­uction—Automation—and a new stage of cognition, whether that be the break I saw in the Absolute Idea as reflecting not just a movement from theory, but a movement from practice that was itself a form of theo­ry, something as seemingly simple as your own life's story which you called Indignant Heart and which ac- , tually was pointing to a new stage of Black conscious­ness that was soon to be revealed in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Well, it happened that in this year's lec­ture tour, when I spoke on the book and on the year 1841, I was asked by Iranian and Latin American revo­lutionaries about those early 1950s when, on the one hand, U.S. imperialism was acting in a most brutal im­perialist way by bringing back the Shah in Iran, and causing a counter-revolution in Guatemala; and, on the other hand, there was a second, revolutionary USA, which today's revolutionaries wished to get a feeling about.

Let's discuss that when we begin the pre-plenary dis­cussions next month, O.K.?

Yours, Raya

my, 1990 - N E W S & L E T T E R S Page 5

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1990-91 (continued from page 1)

put it in The New York Times of May 2, 1990, "Similar alliances have been made before. The great Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, for example, thought it best to restrain Alexander of Russia by allying with him. It is no secret that among France's motives for joining NATO was a desire to keep a watch on Germany."

While Bush and Gorbachev have a common interest in supporting each other in an ideological struggle to stave-off a real revolutionary leap toward a new human society, they remain competitors in the struggle for world domination. This is especially seen on the ques­tion of Germany, which is again back at the center of world political alignments. Bush continues to try to move the markers that have divided Europe since World War II further East, by insisting on a reunited Germany becoming a full member of a NATO dominat­ed by the U.S. Gorbachev has resisted the inclusion of Germany in any such NATO, but the depth of his crises at home weakens his hand. The unsettled nature of the German question has prompted the superpowers and their European allies to plan an ever­growing series of meetings and mini-summits throughout the summer.

Only six months ago, it looked as if t h e masse s of Eas t Eu rope would m a k e Revolution the determinant in the hea r t of Europe. By today, how­ever, it is the ru le rs who a re taking the initiative in t ry ing to re-shape the m a p of Europe. It compels a serious look a t wha t happened to those East European revolts .

During the height of the East Euro­pean revolts of last Fall, the masses held up banners reading, "Poland 10 years, Hungary 10 months, East Ger­many 10 weeks, Czechoslovakia 10 days." It was a profound expression of how fast the Idea of Freedom moves in our age. But what is also true is how much earlier the contradictions within the movements emerge today, and how fast the rulers move to exploit them before the revolu­tion has even had the chance to complete its first act.

Thus, Romania's revolt at first looked to be the most uncompromising of all, precisely because so much blood had to be spilled to bring down the Ceausescu dictator­ship. Yet, within a mere two weeks, the former cronies of Ceausescu in the National Salvation Front gained control of the revolution. These de-Stalinized Stalinists have solidified their power even more since the recent elections, brutally attacking any who challenge Iliescu's dictatorial rule.

Or take East Germany, where barely had new forms of organization of dissidents, factory workers, women and youth- been formed which galvanized the movement that brought down the Berlin Wall, than all the old po­litical tendencies rushed in from the West, hijacking the revolution before the indigenous forces even had a chance to unfurl a new banner of liberation.

Even in Czechoslovakia, where unlike East Germany and Romania the genuine dissidents came to power, many questions about where that revolt has led are being raised, now that some Civic Forum leaders are pointing to Poland's rush into "free-market capitalism" as their goal. It took 10 years for state-capitalism to get Solidarity to assume responsibility for the very system Polish workers have been fighting against for over 40 years. By 1990, it takes but months for the capitalists to convince the new semi-independent states of East Europe to do the same.

I t seems ut ter ly fantastic tha t anyone could con­sider Poland today as any "vision" of the future, giv­en the devasta t ing deterioration in living and work­ing conditions that is so r ampan t some Polish activ­is ts a re asking, "Will Poland become the Bangladesh

of Europe?" 2 That anyone could consider this a "vi­sion" of the future, h a s everything to do with revolu­t ionaries becoming so weighed down with conscious­ness of technological backwardness , and so impa­t ient wi th mass creativity and the working out of a philosophy of revolution, tha t they t u rn to one of the two poles of world capital a s the way out.

This is what all too many are falling prey to today, from Poland to Czechoslovakia, and from East Ger­many to Hungary. It is living testimony to the power of an ideology—the ideology of the "self-limiting revolu­tion."

The idea of a "self-limiting revolution" was first artic­ulated at the height of Poland's revolutionary upsurge of 1981, by Jacek Kuron. Kuron, then an opposition leader, argued that the threat of Russian military inter­vention meant the movement had to place limits on the means by which it struggled for a new society, by mod­erating the radicalism of its demands. Raya Dunayev­skaya hit out at once against this idea, writing, "Be­cause [Kuron] had departed from Marxism and had no

philosophy of revolution, he came up with the self-para­lyzing concept of a 'self-limiting revolution.' "

Dunayevskaya's critique of the "self-limiting revolu­tion" in the early 1980s was unseparated from her ana­lyses of the many new revolutions that had broken out as the decade began—Poland, South Africa, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iran. It isn't that any of these revolts Were lacking in daring or mass creativity; it isn't that they didn't forge new forms of organization demanding Free­dom Now, whether from apartheid or from state-capi­talism masquerading as Communism, whether from U.S. imperialism or the native ruling class. Rather, what Dunayevskaya showed, in exhaustive analyses, was how quickly revolution can be transformed into its opposite once the mass upsurges are not met by revolu­tionaries with a total philosophy of freedom.

By 1989-90, the philosophic gap looms so large, that the idea of a "self-hmiting revolution" has taken hold, not just in Poland, but in East Europe as a whole. Only now, limits aren't being placed only on the means of getting to a new society; all too many are now placing limits on the goal itself, the vision of a new human so­ciety. I t is the Absolute of Freedom that the masses keep striving for, that is under attack by today's retro­gressive ideology of the "self-limiting revolution."

That the "self-limiting revolution" could become the ideological pull in East Europe by 1989-90, is t ru­ly shocking. It w a s in East Europe, after all, tha t a new epoch was born in the mid-1950s, when the East German revolt of 1953 and Hungar ian Revolution of

1956 helped p ry from the Archives Marx's now-fa­mous "Humanis t Essays" of 1844, as the masses hit out for total freedom independent of both the East and the West.

Raya Dunayevskaya anticipated this drive to total freedom with her May 1953, "Letters on Hegel's Abso­lutes." What was new with these Letters was that she discerned within Hegel's Absolutes a dialectic not alone in the movement from theory to practice, but also from practice to theory. A month later, the East German workers' revolt broke out, shattering the myth of the invincibility of Communist totalitarianism. As Dunayev­skaya wrote in August 1953, "We have reached the be­ginning of the end of Russian totalitarianism."3

For the next 34 years, Dunayevskaya developed a philosophy of revolution to meet the challenge of the new irovements from practice of our era. She called it "Marxist-Humanism." From the moment she founded that philosophy, her embrace of the new passions for freedom upsurging from below was unseparated from projecting the challenge to all the freedom movements to work out the unity of philosophy and revolution. Her 1953 philosophic breakthrough definitely specified, as she put it in 1987, that there is a dual movement in the Absolute—"the movement from practice that is itself a form of theory, and the movement from theory that is itself a form of philosophy and revolution."4 It signified that it takes both the movements from practice and from theory, worked out as a unity, as a new begin­ning, for the path to a new society to truly unfold.

The tragedy of the post-World War II era is that the post-Marx Marxists of all varieties, as well as non-Marxist revolutionaries, failed to meet the new move­ments from practice with such a philosophy of revolu­tion. The division between theory and practice, and be­tween philosophy and organization, was not transcend­ed. I t left a gaping void in the movements, into which has rushed the "self-limiting revolution." By now, it is a veritable world stage of thinking, the form in which ide­ological pollution manifests itself today. It is what the rulers have been happy to exploit.

The more this void persists, the more crucial does it become to recrea te the one philosophy of revolution of the post-World War II era which both anticipated the East European revolts and issued a challenge to all freedom movements to work out a new relation of phil­osophy to revolution—Marxist-Humanism. It means working out "How to Begin Anew?" on the basis of the highest expression of freedom struggle and thought of our era.

Where the philosophic-organizational responsibility for working out "How to Begin Anew?" is skipped over, all sorts of retrogressive features in thought rush in, sucking even would-be revolutionaries into the trap of proclaiming that "Marxism is dead" and that we have reached the "end of philosophy." Without taking the philosophic-organizational responsibility for filling that void, there is no way to avoid the pull of the "self-lim­iting revolution" upon ourselves.

That is why it is so crucial to confront wha t Raya Dunayevskaya projected in her 1984 "Not by Prac­tice Alone": "Marx 's theory of the philosophy of rev­olution in permanence, not as an abstract ion but as the actual concrete [is] needed in order both to be armed against being pulled into the world marke t of the whirlpool of capitalism, s tate as well as private, and a s requir ing a decentralized organization whose g round is t ha t cont inuing ' revolut ion in perma-

2. This statement is from a Polish activist who had read our new Pol­ish-language pamphlet, Kapitalizm panstwowy i wschodnioeuropej-skie bunty, containing several writings of Raya Dunayevskaya.

3. See Dunayevskaya's "The Beria Purge" in The Raya Dunayev­skaya Collection, #2200 and #5214.

4. This statement, from a letter by Dunayevskaya of Jan. 13, 1987, serves as the frontispiece quote to the preface of The Philosophic Mo­ment of Marxist-Humanism, which contains her "Presentation on Dia­lectics of Organization and Philosophy" of June 1, 1987, and her 1953 "Letters on Hegel's Absolutes."

II. Economic Reality and Ideology in the Age of State-Capitalism "The fundamental error of those who assume that

a single capitalist society is not governed by the same laws as a society composed of private property-owning capitalists lies in a failure to realize that what happens in the market is not the cause, but the consequence, of the inherent contradictions of the process of production....Our specific single capi­talist society has achieved some highly modern fac­tories—but U has not stopped to raise the living standards of the masses of Russian workers. It can­not. Capital will not allow it. Because of this the economy is in constant crisis."

—Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, pp. 234-5

The philosophy of revolution that arms us with "the actual concrete needed" today is Marxist-Humanism. It would have been impossible to create without the theo­ry of state-capitalism, which Raya Dunayevskaya devel­oped in the 1940«. Dunayevskaya's analysis of the trans­formation of the first workers' state into a state-capital­ist society under Stalin's bloody counter-revolution was rooted from the start in the philosophic-economic cate­gories of Marx's Capital and in the humanist concepts she discovered in his 1844 "Humanist Essays." Integral to Dunayevskaya's theory of state-capitalism were the forces of revolt fighting its grip.

By.today, the crises within Russia are so deep that, despite all of Bush's efforts to save Gorbachev, the real

. question- i s whether-anyone oan save -him. In-one re-; public after another, the nationalities are demanding jn-'• dependence.- The -miners -who last -year -carried -cut tlhe

first nationwide strike since the Russian Revolution are now calling for a new labor union totally independent of the party and the government. Most pressing of all, the economy is in shambles and everywhere the shelves are empty of the most basic goods and foodstuffs.

Far from the economic crisis being a question of the absence of a so-called "free market," as the pundits to­day would have us believe, Dunayevskaya long ago pin­pointed the crisis as lying in the relations at the point of production—in capitalism's relentless drive to extract the maximum unpaid hours of labor while paying the worker the minimum. Think of the empty shelves and endless lines in Russia today when you read her analy­sis written in 1947:

"But what produces the 'scarcity of consumers goods'? It is not merely the backwardness of the economy, since the same backwardness has not pre­vented Russia from keeping, approximately, pace with advanced capitalist lands in the production of means of production. The relationship of means of production to means of consumption...and not the 'scarcity of consumer goods' is the decisive relation­ship. That is so because this relationship is only the material reflection of the capitalists' domination over the laborer through the mastery of dead over living labor." » ,

5. See Dunayevskaya's Russia as State-Capitalist Society (News & Letters, 1973) p. 25. Dunayevskaya's study, "The Nature of the Russian

»Economy," was first published in the New International, Dec 1942

While the post-World War II world proved to be the age of state-capitalism—which, far from being only a "Russian question," was a world stage—the efforts to achieve industrialization through state intervention in the economy brought capitalism's domination of means of production over means of consumption to a new ex­treme in Russia. Since the 1930s it has meant low living standards, pitiful wages, and the veritable destruction of the country's agriculture, whose farms became "factories without roofs."6 The Russian workers and peasants have responded by refusing to fulfill the production norms set by the state. The "low productivity" of the Russian workers has been the measure of their revolt ever since the time of Stalin.

In face of this, one Russian ruler after another has searched for ever-newer ways of squeezing more prod­uctivity out of the workers by accumulating capital at the expense of living labor. I t was true of Khrushchev, with his fantastic schemes to "catch up with the West" in industrial production. It was true of Brezhnev, with his illusion that achieving nuclear parity with the U.S. would grant Russia the superpower status its economy could not deliver. None of the efforts at "reform from

(continued on page 6)

and

Society. See the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #69-101. See also Kevin Anderson's essay, "The Marcuse-Dunayevskaya Dialogue" in Studies in Soviet Thought, 39:89-109, 1990, which discusses the barrier one faces with the "absence of a concept of state capitalism " >

Page 6 N E W S & L E T T E R S JULY, 1990

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1990-91 (continued from page 5)

above" by the totalitarian rulers proved capable of ex­tracting the economy from its crises, precisely because they all adhered to the capitalist law of value.

This is no less true of Gorbachev. His policy of peres-troika at first emphasized the need for high-technology, new investments in machinofacture and "labor disci­pline." When that failed to raise production, he began emphasizing the need for labor and monetary markets. That Gorbachev can by now become an advocate of "market reforms" hardly contradicts the state-capitalist nature of his rule, for there is no class difference be­tween state-capitalism and "private" capitalism. Precise­ly for that reason, the latest efforts at "reform from above" can hardly extract Russia from its crises.

That Russia is today experiencing an economic cri­sis is thus hardly new. What is new in the 1980s is the all-important role assumed by ideology, which was first set into motion by Gorbachev's mentor, Yuri Andropov, who merged the functions of the KGB, head of state, and ideology. Gorbachev has taken this to a new height, by changing the content of the ruling ideology. Ever since Bukharin-Stalin formulated their theory of "socialism in one coun­try," the workers of the USSR have been told to en­dure endless hardships and "sacrifices" for the sake of building what the rulers called "socialism." By the 1980s, the system reached such a state of total de­generacy, that Gorbachev was forced to modify the old ideology. He now tells the masses to endure end­less hardships and "sacrifices" for the sake of build­ing a "free market" economy.

In a word, Gorbachevism has become the Russian variant of Reaganism. This is what underpins Gorba­chev's recent declaration that the Warsaw Pact no long­er views the West as its ideological enemy. The "new order" Bush and Gorbachev speak of today is, to use the words of Marx, "one that proclaims surplus value to be the sole end and aim of humanity." THE "RESTRUCTURED"

. ECONOMY IN THE U.S.

It is not only the workers of the USSR who are being told to "sacrifice" for the sake of a restructured econo­my. That is exactly what the workers of the U.S. have been told throughout the 1980s. What drove that res­tructuring was capitalism's response to the falling rate of profit that sharply confronted it with the 1974-75 economic recession. Capitalism responded with a drive to extract ever more unpaid hours of labor, resulting in a tidal wave of concession-ridden contracts, homeless-ness, erosion of health care and environmental destruc­tion. U.S. workers suffered the deepest plunge in living standards since World War II; real U.S. wages are now at their lowest level since 1960.

As always, the conditions for Black America far ex­ceed the misery of white America, whether that be in joblessness, low pay or deteriorating health. The ramp­ant racism grows ever-worse as the 1990s begin. There is no more glaring proof of that than that Black mortal­ity rates are increasing in absolute terms. Even the conservative New England Journal of Medicine report­ed (Jan. 18, 1990) that mortality rates for those between tiie ages of five and 65 are worse in Harlem than in Bangladesh! The Bush acbninistration is trying to cover over this unconscionable situation by blaming the plight of Black America all on "drug abuse."

Black America has no intention of being written off at the end of this lethal decade of restructuring. Their outpouring during the Mandela tour in every part of the country has demonstrated not only their anger and opposition to the daily misery the Black masses suffer. It also manifests a search for how to begin anew their unceasing struggle to uproot this dehumanizing system once and for all.

The fact that so many of the Youth have joined in these demonstrations is part of this same search. They too have felt the blows of Reaganism's restructuring, which has spawned a "two-tiered" system not only in the job-market but in their schools. The "privatization" of education now means the exclusion of working-class youth from college, while learning in the public schools is made nearly impossible under conditions of over­crowding and lack of decent facilities. It has brought forth wide-spread protests from elementary school and university students alike.

The Women's Liberation Movement, too, has seen a new surge of opposition to the vicious decade-long on­slaught against all the rights they thought they had won. That protest has brought about some welcome election victories for pro-choice candidates in many parts of the country. But when we see that no less than 82% of the counties in the U.S. already have not a sin­gle clinic or hospital that will perform abortions and no less than 41 states refuse to pay for abortions for poor women, women are asking: What have we won?

Every aspect of our lives has felt the "restructur­ing." Listen to a meatpacking worker describe the changes in his family's life: "Almost immediately af­ter Reagan became President, we began to experi­ence a series of layoffs. All the savings we had dis­appeared. Leisure time turned into idle time because you could only do so much without money. Family relations were strained because we had a feeling of no control over our lives. My wife got a minimum wage job just to make ends meet. I got another job but had to take a pay cut of 50%. Now we have too much work, but still not enough money. We no long­er have any time to ourselves. Living with R\aga-nomics isn't living, it's existing."

Even with all these give-backs and concessions, capi­

talism hasn't been able to extract itself from the crisis which engulfed it with the 1974-75 global recession. De­spite the new automation and speed-up, the average rates of labor productivity growth were 1.3% in the 1980s, compared to a 2.8% rate from 1948-73. Nor have the 1980s produced any "investment boom"; net invest­ments averaged 5% of GNP (Gross National Product) since 1982, two percentage points below the average from 1948-82. Most important, while the mass of corpo­rate profits rose in the 1980s—largely thanks to Reag­an's tax cuts—the rate of profit is lower today than even in the 1970s. Whereas corporate profits amounted to 11.7% of GNP in 1960, and 6.9% in 1969, today they are a paltry 5.3%.

The capitalists may argue that the rate of profit isn't as crucial a determinant today, since so much of their financing comes from massive borrowing. But what does all this piling up of massive debt achieve except to put off the day of reckoning for capitalism? The debt is the only thing that did "boom" in the 1980s—total private and public debt rose from $4.7 trillion in 1980 to over $13 trillion today. It has led to the high interest rates which, combined with Reagan's deregulations, led to a decade of such speculative financial madness as to land us in the Savings & Loan disaster. The Stanford Law and Policy Review estimated that the S&L crisis will end up costing the taxpayers $1.4 trillion!

So fragile is the U.S. economy that the capitalists have come up with a new word for it—"slugflation,"

signifying sluggish growth and rising inflation. Sid-linger & Co., a Pennsylvania consulting firm, esti­mates that 41 states of the U.S. are already in a re­cession. For all of Reagan's efforts to "privatize" the economy, the truth is that "free market" capitalism can no more resolve its crises than state-capitalism.

What is crucial is how the economic restructuring of the 1980s has been accompanied by a new ideological stage—Reaganism. It has polluted the air not only of rulers but the Left, and not only nationally but interna­tionally. This false consciousness is an integral part of capitalism's efforts to continue restructuring itself into the 1990s.

THE CARVING UP OF THE THIRD WORLD

Just as the birth and development of capitalism in the West emerged through the "so-called primitive ac­cumulation of capital"—slavery, colonialism, imperial­ism—so the economic restructuring of the 1980s has had a devastating impact on the Third World. Whereas in the early 1980s IMF (International Monetary Fund) austerity measures were considered the "remedy" of last resort, even by reactionary Third World governments, today throughout Latin America and Africa such aus­terity measures are the norm. In Africa, the UN reports that living standards have dropped beneath that of the year of independence, 1960! As for Latin America, Boliv­ia was one of the first to feel the impact of Reaganism, with its 1985 austerity program, which forced down liv­ing conditions by 50%. The U.S. advisor to the plan, Jeffrey Sachs, is now supervising Mazowiecki's austerity plan in Poland. Mexico has suffered as deep a drop in living conditions; its impending negotiations with the U.S. for a "free trade" agreement will no doubt create

even more misery and suffering there. And Brazil has just experienced a drastic austerity package, resulting in massive new unemployment in a land where millions of children roam the streets hungry each night.

In no way do these "free market reforms" contradict the state-capitalist nature of our world. Carlos Langoni, ex-president of the Central Bank of Brazil, put it clearly enough: "The great paradox is that to get to the free market paradise we have to go through the inferno of more stiate intervention, more control, more bureaucra­cy." (New York Times 5/20/90).

What characterizes this "restructuring" is not only abject poverty and rampant racism, but the escalating threat of war. Nowhere is it more ominous than in the Middle East. Israel has never had such a reactionary government as Shamir's, in which the balance of power is held by the neo-fascist Tehiya Party, led by that ul­tra-fanatic, Guela Cohen, with Ariel Sharon as housing and immigration minister. Shamir's declaration that he will not even discuss the status of the West Bank and Gaza with any Palestinian who doesn't recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Palestinian lands is a formula for their military occupation in perpetuity.

Shamir has found his match in Saddam Hussein, whose murderous deeds are suddenly being forgiven— from initiating the Iran/Iraq War, to launching genoci-dal attacks on the Kurds, to promulgating a law that al­lows men to murder any woman in their family for "adultery"—all because he promises to annihilate half

of Israel with chemical weapons. Hussein is now being embraced by virtually all the Arab rulers, including Arafat.

In face of all these worsening conditions of life and 1 labor, how>. can it be that the concept of "self-limiting

revolution"—rather than the total uprooting of this f exploitative, racist, sexist society—has become a ver-1 itable world stage of thinking? f We see ite pull in South Africa, where, after the mas-- ses won Mandela's release, a section of the movement f appears ready to accept a negotiated settlement that is ) far from the total freedom the masses have been fight­

ing for. Its piill can be seen in Central America, where, after the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicara­gua, the FMLN in El Salvador has entered into negotia­tions with the Cristiani government, which has not

n managed to: prosecute a single murderer of the priests - killed last year, much less the thousands of others killed - by the death squads. i For such a contradiction to confront the movements n for freedom tells us how deep we have to dig into ) thought itself to overcome these "mind-forged mana-t cles." Never has there been a greater need to reach for s, a genuine philosophy of revolution. As Raya Dunayev-'•- skaya wrote i in Philosophy and Revolution: s [We must face] "the compelling objective forces of e world production, the pull of the world market, and - the underlying philosophy of the masses which Marx i, called 'the quest for universality'... The whole point

seems to be to hold on to the principle of creativity, i> and the contradictory process by which creativity y develops...." fi What we -are confronting is the whole question of e "How to Begin Anew?"—the question that has confront-e ed revolutionaries at all historic turning points.

JULY, 1990 N E W S & L E T T E R S Page 7

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1990-91 ///. The "Creativity of Cognition" as the Energizing Force for Working Out

Marxist-Humanism As New Beginning "Unless Marxist-Humanists fully grasped the his­

toric continuity to Marx's Humanism and worked out the trail to the 1980s on the basis of those new moments in Marx's last decade, the expression 'tak­ing organizational responsibility for Marxist-Hu­manism,' would have no meaning...that expression means that the prerequisite for it was, at one and the same time, catching the historic continuity as

' well as working it out for our age." —Raya Dunayevskaya, 1981 ?

At every point in her development of Marxist-Hu­manism, Raya Dunayevskaya continuously worked out the question "How to Begin Anew?" That was true as early as the 1940s, when in response to the transforma­tion of the Russian Revolution from a workers' state into a state-capitalist society, she went in search of new forces of revolution and dug into heretofore neglected philosophic dimensions of Marx's Marxism in working out her theory of state-capitalism. As early as 1941, she began probing into what later became known as Marx's 1844 "Humanist Essays"; by the late 1940s she had translated Lenin's 1914 Philosophic Notebooks on He­gel. I t was in the course of completing this translation, that Dunayevskaya participated in the historic wildcat strike of 100,000 miners against the introduction of au­tomation in West Virginia, where workers asked, "What kind' of labor should man do?"

In 1953, Dunayevskaya's search for "How to Begin Anew?" took her to a direct confrontation with the cul­mination of Hegel's philosophy—the "Absolute Idea" of his Science of Logic and "Absolute Mind" of his Phil­osophy of Mind. Her "Letters on Hegel's Absolutes" of May 12 and 20, 1953, marked the philosophic birth of Marxist-Humanism. I t was this philosophic break­through which Dunayevskaya concretized anew in the face of ever-new objective and subjective developments over the next 30 years, in each of her "trilogy of revolu­tion"—Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revo­lution, and Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution.

The truth is that the question "How to Begin Anew?" informed the whole of Dunayevskaya's dialectic metho­dology, even after her founding of Marxist-Humanism, even after she rounded out Marxist-Humanism as a full body of ideas with her trilogy of revolution. In the 1980s she posed the need for philosophic new beginnings more sharply than ever, as she engaged in a philosophic comprehension of her whole body of thought. It reached its climax with her work of 1986-87, as she was engaged in working on her projected book, "Dialectics of Organi­zation and Philosophy: The 'Party' and Forms of Organ­ization Born out of Spontaneity."

These 1980s writings help disclose that "How to Be­gin Anew" is never a question of beginning ab novo, as if one can disregard the prior highpoints of freedom ac­tion and thought. I t rather requires a summation of the past that does not stop at a retrospective, but becomes the kind of summation that releases a new beginning. Dunayevskaya spoke to this question of "summation as new beginning" in a document she asked to have repro­duced in time for the 1986 Convention of News and Letters Committees (the last she lived to attend)—her 1974 speech to the Hegel Society of America, "Hegel's Absolute as New Beginning," delivered shortly after she completed Philosophy and Revolution. She there pro­jected what no one else before saw in HegeL

"Whatever Hegel said, and meant, about the Owl of Minerva spreading its wings only at dusk simply does not follow from the objectivity of the drive, the summation in which the advance is immanent in the

7. This statement is from Dunayevskaya's summation to the 1981 Ple­num of News and Letters Committees; it will appear as part of a new Introduction to the 1991 edition of Rosa Luxemburg, Women's liber­ation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, to be published by the University of Illinois Press.

A discussion of the philosophic category at the c e n t e r o f M a r x i s t - H u m a n i s m ' s b o d y o f thought—

Hegel's Absolute as New Beginning

by Raya Dunayevskaya

A n address g iven to the 1974 Biennial conven­tion of the Hegel Society of America

A textual analysis of the twenty-seven paragraphs that constituted the final chapter of Hegel's Sci­ence of Logic, the Absolute Idea.

$1 (postage included)

order from News & Letters, 59 E Van Buren, Rm. 707, Chicago, IL 60605

present. While he neither gave, nor was interested in, any blueprints for the future, he was not preoccu­pied with death, the 'end' of philosophy, much less of the world....When subjected to the dialectic method from which, according to Hegel, no truth can escape, the conclusion turns out to be a new beginning. There i s no trap in thought. Though it is finite, it breaks through the barriers of the given, reaches out, if not to infinity, surely beyond the historic mo­ment."

We here encounter the power of thought itself, "the creativity of cognition," as what enables a summation to become a new beginning.

This creativity of cognition is so crucial for the for­ward movement of humanity, and yet so rare, that we must look at those historic moments when this creativi­ty of cognition proved to be nothing less than the ener­gizing principle for working out "How to Begin Anew?"

Marx concretized this creativity of cognition through­out the 40-year development of his new continent of thought and of revolution, beginning with his "philo­sophic moment" of 1844. I t was in his 1844 "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic" that Marx achieved a truly epo­chal new beginning, by demystifying Hegel's dialectic, in putting humanity back into the dialectic of negativity at the same time as praising Hegel's "negation of the nega­tion," absolute negativity, for expressing "the actual movement of history." Far from being a question of "standing Hegel right side up" or replacing Hegelian idealism with "materialism," Marx was projecting a to-

what "breaks through the barriers of the given, reaches out, if not to infinity, surely beyond the historic mo­ment."

Raya worked out this creativity of cognition in each book of her "trilogy of revolution." It is seen in how each work not only paralleled the 30-year movement from practice, but also anticipated the future inherent in the present. As she said of Marxism and Freedom in her 1983 essay on "Grenada: Counter-Revolution and Revolution," "Marxism and Freedom was structured on the movement from practice not alone in our age but from the age of revolutions, 1776, 1789—and on the Hegelian dialectic from then to today. What predomi­nated, however, was the question that tore at the vitals of all revolutionary movements: 'What Happens After' power is achieved."

With Philosophy and Revolution (P&R), she wrote in her 1984 "Not by Practice Alone," "we had a new sit­uation. It is not alone all the new passions and forces of the 1960s with which the book ends, but the fact that the philosophic predominates over the historic, the the­ory over the practice; indeed, the very fact that the structure is the exact opposite of what Marxism & Freedom was—that is, not the movement from practice, but the movement from theory—gave the whole ques­tion of Hegelian dialectics 'in and of itself a totally new meaning, in the sense that it demanded detailing not only the movement from practice but that from theory. That movement from theory becomes the uniqueness of Marxist-Humanist philosophy and our original contrib-

Forthcoming in 1991

a new edition of •&•

Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, j and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution "1

containing as a new introduction two critical writings of the 1980s

by Raya Dunayevskaya

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tally new philosophy, Marxism, which "distinguishes it­self both from Idealism and Materialism, and is, at the same time, the truth uniting both."

The post-Marx Marxists totally misread Marx when they acted as if Marx's critique of Hegel for dealing only with various stages of consciousness, rather than with men and women thinking, meant that Marx there­by placed limits on the power of thought. The very op­posite is the case. Precisely because Marx rooted the dialectic in the live proletarian struggles for freedom at the point of production and in the struggle for new man/woman relations, the power of thought could final­ly be unchained, for cognition was now rooted in the human dimension. Marx's unchaining of the dialectic meant that thought in his hands not only reflects what is, ' but also releases a new vision of the future. He spelled out that vision of a new society in his 1844 "Cri­tique," calling it a "New Humanism" that stands in op­position both to private capitalism and "vulgar commu­nism."

Raya Dunayevskaya achieved historic-philosophic continuity with Marx's unchaining of the dialectic with her 1953 "Letters on Hegel's Absolutes." She there discerned a dual movement for our day within Hegel's Absolute—both a movement from theory to practice, and a movement from practice to theory. In doing so, she posed the live human struggles for freedom as integral to the Hegelian dialectic at one and the same time as embracing the dialectical flow of Hegel's epochal summation of his entire philoso­phy in the final three syllogisms of his Philosophy of Mind, which culminates in the "Self-Thinking Idea." Far from seeing this as any pinnacle or stopping point, Dunayevskaya discerned freedom-filled begin­nings in the "Self-Thinking Idea."

As she wrote three decades later in a paragraph add­ed to Rosa Luxumburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, "That which Hegel judged to be the synthesis of the Self-Thinking Idea and the Self-Bringing Forth of Liberty, Marxist-Human­ism holds, is what Marx called the new society. The many paths to get there are not easy to work out."8

With her philosophic breakthrough of 1953, Dunayev­skaya made the human struggles for freedom so integral to the Absolute as to release the power of thought as

8. This is from a paragraph added by Dunayevskaya to Rosa Luxem­burg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution in September 1982, after the book went to press; it will appear in the new 1991 edition of the book.

ution to Marx's Marxism." Dunayevskaya spelled out that unique contribution in Chapter 1 of P&R, entitled "Absolute Negativity as New Beginning."

Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, Raya wrote in the 1985 Marxist-Humanist Perspectives Thesis, "called Marx's 'new moments' the trail to the 1980s [where] we finally summarized Marx's Marxism and not only Hegel's Ab­solute Idea as both totality and as a new beginning for our age, as organization and philosophy, as dialec­tics of revolution and of thought, the whole of the dia­lectic. It spelled out, at one and the same time, that the catching of the continuity with Marx's Marxism and seeing that the hundred years' discontinuity between the ages was Marxist-Humanist continuity or the work­ing out of Marx's Humanism for our age. It is that look' at the totality of Marx's Marxism as new beginning, that new look at Marx's Archives, that also led us to see the Marxist-Humanist Archives in a new way."

Following the publication of this work in 1982, with its central category of "post-Marx Marxism as pejora­tive, beginning with Engels," Dunayevskaya projected this "new way" of viewing the Marxist-Humanist Ar­chives, in a whole series of "retrospective-perspectives" of Marxist-Humanism,, ranging from Introduction-Over­views of new editions of her works, to a new edition of her Archives. By 1986-87, her philosophic comprehen­sion of Marxist-Humanism deepened with her work on "Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy." I t reached its culmination with her Presentation of June 1, 1987, in " which she once more returned to her 1953 "Letters on Hegel's Absolutes," now projecting them as die "philo­sophic moment" for her entire development of Marxist-Humanism, including on organization.

One of the many ways in which this Presentation of June 1, 1987, speaks to the importance of the creativity of cognition in working out the philosophy of freedom as new beginning, is her discussion of Marx's 1875 "Cri­tique of the Gotha Program."

In his critical "marginal notes" to the Gotha Pro­gram, Marx hit out against his supposed followers (the "Eisenachists") for uniting in a totally unprincipled^ fashion with the opponents of Marx's Marxism, the Las^™* salleans. Marx issued a merciless critique of the "Marx­ists" for separating the Marxian principles from the or­ganization they were building. It was hardly the first time Marx had entered into a discussion of organiza­tional questions. As Dunayevskaya writes in her Presen­tation of June 1, 1987, Marx's 1844 "Humanist Essays" ->.

(continued on page 8)

Page'S N E W S & L E T T E R S 3ULY, 1990

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1990-91 were the "philosophic moment for all of Marx's Marx­ism, including on organization."9 She says that Marx's 1844 "Humanist Essays" were "the ground for organi­zation throughoutihis life, from the moment he did 'ex­perience' the philosophic moment [of 1844]..." And yet, Dunayevskaya adds, "Only with the Critique of the Go-tha Program in 1875 did Marx fully return to that mo­ment as it was concretized for organization...."

A long trek in the self-determination of the Idea took Marx from 1844 to 1875; those three decades included his writing of the Communist Manifesto and his partic­ipation in the 1848 Revolutions; his activity in the First International and his writing of Capital; his embrace of the 1871 Paris Commune and his re-working of Capital in its 1875 French edition. So crucial did Marx consider this French edition of Capital, that he sent copies of it

**" to the leaders of the German Social Democracy along with his "Critique of the Gotha Program."

What is especially crucial for today about Marx's 1875 "Critique of the Gotha Program" is that Marx there fully returns to his "philosophic moment" of 1844 as it was concretized for organization, at the very same time as releasing his fullest-ever projec­tion of "what happens after" the overthrow of capi­talism. Dunayevskaya writes, "There is no way now, no matter how Marx kept from trying to give any blueprints for the future, not to develop a general view of where we're headed for the day after the conquest of power, the day after we have rid our­selves of the birthmarks of capitalism when a new

9. See Dunayevskaya's "Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy" of June 1, 1987, in The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism (TPMMH).

generation can finally see all its potentiality put an end once and for all to the division between mental and manual labor." (TPMMH, p. 7).

In short, just as Marx in 1844 made humanity so inte­gral to the Hegelian dialectic that he released the power of thought as what reaches for the future, spelling it out as a "new Humanism"—so in 1875, in concretizing that philosophic moment fully for organization, he released his fullest-ever projection of what labor in the new soci­ety will be like. We begin to see that when the barriers that divide mental from manual, theory from practice, philosophy from organization are overcome, the power of thought attains so rich a human dimension that it not only reflects what is, but works out a path to the future.

Far from this being a question only for Marx's day, the question our age faces is, will we break down the barriers that divide theory from practice and philosophy from organization in concretizing the "creativity of cog­nition" as our path to a freedom-filled future?

As Dunayevskaya wrote in her Jan. 3, 1987 'The Year of Only Eight Months," "The burning question of the day remains: What happens the day after? How can we continue Marx's unchaining of the dia­lectic organizationally, with the principles he out­lines in his 'Critique of the Gotha Program'?"

Dunayevskaya's work of 1986-87 on "Dialectics of Or­ganization and Philosophy" spoke to this crucial task. She there returned to her philosophic moment of 1953 once again, this time seeing it as the "ground and roof for her entire development of Marxist-Humanism, in­cluding on organization. Her return to her 1953 Let­ters was at the heart of the unprecedented new work she was embarking upon—unprecedented because it marked the first time in the Marxist movement that the

question of organization would be dialectically treated in a comprehensive manner. But it wasn't only a ques­tion of writing a book. At the same time* Dunayevskaya was challenging News and Letters Committees, and in­deed all revolutionaries who seek a total philosophy of freedom, to meet the challenge of fully concretizing her philosophy of revolution for organization.

This unprecedented challenge remains our task; it is our path to the future. To embark on this "untrodden path of dialectics of organization and philosophy" in­volves nothing short of filling what Dunayevskaya called in her Presentation of June 1, 1987, the "112-year void" on the dialectics of organization and philosophy.

Dunayevskaya died before being able to write her book; there is no way of knowing all she would have de­veloped in it. But in the aftermath of her death on June 9, 1987, and in face of the momentous world his­toric changes we have witnessed over the past year, the ground she projected for working out "How to Begin Anew?" in her writings of 1986-87 is more crucial to ex­plore and work out than ever before. It calls for further exploration of her whole body of work with eyes of her 1980s writings, in which she projected her philosophic comprehension of Marxist-Humanism, unseparated from taking greater organizational responsibility for working out her philosophy of Marxist-Humanism today.

It is the power of thought released by Dunayevska­ya's philosophic comprehension of Marxist-Humanism that constitutes the energizing principle for working out "How to Begin Anew?" Raya's working out of the Abso­lute of Marxist-Humanism as new beginning is the power of thought that must become our determinant, if we are to avoid the pull of any "self-limiting revolution" upon ourselves.

in libraries nationally and internationally. The international dimension of our work with the

"trilogy of revolution"—which includes the Persian translation of Chapter 12 of RLWLMPR, our new Polish pamphlet centered on the translation of Chapter 8 of P&R, and new Spanish editions of both M&F and P&R—wlU be deepened and expanded through in-person dialogues both with Mexico and with Europe by the time we meet in Convention. What was new about our Spring trip to Mexico was not only the contract achieved! for a Spanish edition of Raya's Women's Lib­eration and the Dialectics of Revolution, but the way the projection of her concept of Marx's multi-linearism and her view of Hegel's Absolutes as New Beginnings found an affinity in Latin American audiences, who wish to continue the dialogue with us.

It is our work as American revolutionaries right here at home that is the most crucial of all. It underlines the importance of our participation in all the freedom movements—from that of labor and the Black dimen­sion to Women and youth. Never was it more important to deepen our relationship with the ongoing revolution­ary Black and labor dimensions which are woven into the very fabric of Marxist-Humanism.

It remains crucial to elicit these voices of revolt in the pages of News & Letters (N&L) unseparated from continuing to hear Raya's voice in the paper. If we can succeed in making her column the determinant of our work with the newspaper, it will manifest itself both in how we elicit responses to her column from our readers, and in what new theoretical developments we concretize in the form of essays, articles and reviews. The new re­views of Raya's work that appeared in major journals this year are the kind of work we seek to develop fur­ther in the year ahead.

Whatever the tasks we undertake next year, the phil­osophic-organizational responsibility for Marxist-Hu­manism means also financial responsibility. We will need a n>ir<imiim of $35,000 for our Sustaining Fund to keep NAIL going and deepen the outreach of Marxist-Humanism.

Finally, seeking to hold inseparable our needed organ­izational growth and Raya Dunayevskaya's unique con­cept of organization, which was integral to her whole development of Marxist-Humanism, remains our most unfinished task. Toward that end, the classes we held this year on P&R represented our effort to concretize further the methodology of philosophic comprehension that we bad projected in our 1989 Draft for Perspec­tives Thesis. What was distinctive this year was that, precisely because the class syllabus represented an un­compromising projection of that methodology, we were able to involve the consistent participation of new friends in the classes, especially at the Center.

The inreach we have received this year from all our activities demonstrates that, despite all the talk that "Marxian is dead," masses of people continue to search for new ways to begin anew. That is what challenges any conception of the "end of philosophy." It demands that the philosophic and organizational responsibilityJbr working out Marxist-Humanism in News and Letters Committees be the determinant of our lives.

It is that vision of the future which we invite all those fighting for total freedom to join in working out with us.' , , , . . ,

1 ' ' *. *Tne Resident liditoriaf Board

IV. Will Dunayevskaya's Philosophic Comprehension of Man

New Beginning? Our Philosophic-Organizational 7

"Only live human beings can recreate the revolu­tionary dialectic forever anew. And these live human beings must do so in theory as well as in practice. It is not a question only of meeting the challenge from practice, but of being able to meet the challenge from the self-development of the Idea, and of deepen­ing theory to the point where it reaches Marx's con­cept of the philosophy of 'revolution in perma­nence.'"

—Raya Dunayevskaya, The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism, p. 13

The objective-subjective urgency to avoid the pull of any self-limiting revolution calls upon us to test our­selves in 1990-91 by taking greater philosophic-organiza­tional responsibility for making Raya's philosophic com­prehension of Marxist-Humanism our new beginning. That makes it necessary to re-emphaske that it is not "our" philosophic comprehension, but Raya's that is the determinant. It's this distinction between the creativity of a founder's thought and that of even the closest col­league which is what Engels never truly caught. Instead of grappling seriously with Marx's creativity of cogni­tion, Engels and the other post-Marx Marxists who fol­lowed Marx's death in 1883 thought it sufficient instead to project their interpretation of what they took to be Marx's conclusions.

It wasn't only what they did but what they did not do that prevented them from recreating Marx's Marxism when faced with a new objective-subjective stage. Neither over-confidence in interpreting the founder's legacy, nor lack of confidence that the founder's philosophy can be developed anew, can en-able us to recreate the Idea of Freedom for the 1990s. The task that faces any who strive to become continuators of a philosophy of revolution is to grasp the founder's thought in such a way that the doors swing open for developing the Idea anew. It's the most difficult task of all.

Raya Dunayevskaya's category of "post-Marx Marx­ism as pejorative, beginning with Engels," remains cru­cial to confront and work through if we are to tran­scend the many barriers standing in the way of taking the Idea of Marxist-Humanism to a new, post-June 9, 1987, sphere.

The publication of The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism, which contains her June 1, 1987,

~ Presentation and her 1953 "Letters on Hegel's Abso­lutes," was an historic event towards that end. By the time of our Draft for Marxist-Humanism Perspectives, . 1989-90, we saw that Raya's philosophic comprehension of Marxist-Humanism had to become our new beginning in order to work out the Idea of Freedom for today. Far from being a perspective for only one year, that is the task for our whole future. It is necessary, however, to take the measure of the tasks we set at our 1989 Ple­num, because how we fared in large part determines the tasks for next year.

Last year we had in hand new Columbia University • Press editions of Marxism and Freedom, from 1776

until Today (M&F) and Philosophy and Revolution, from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao (P&R), each with a new Introduction by Raya from her 1980s writings. Next year we will have a new University of Il­linois Press edition of Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Lib­erat ion , and' Marx's Ph i losophy of Revolut ion

"<r XRLWLMPR), containing as its new Introduction 'Raya's"1

3 9 8 | Summation to the Plenum of News and JjejtterS ft

Committees and her August 1983 Letter outlining the new paragraphs she added to the book after it went to press. This new Introduction can help illuminate Raya's pathway toward what she later called "dialectics of or­ganization and philosophy." Our work with all three books is crucial in the year ahead. What is of special importance is probing the relation between P&R and RLWLMPR.

At the same time, we see as inseparable the two sup­plementary volumes we have donated to the Raya Du­nayevskaya Collection—VoL 13, consisting of her last writings, 1986-87, "Towards the Dialectic of Organiza­tion and Philosophy;" and Vol. 14, consisting of her writings from 1953-83 documenting the process of writ­ing her "trilogy of revolution." Our study of these vol­umes has barely begun, as has our work to place them

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New Beginning? Our Philosophic-Organizational Tasks for 1990-91

'JWLY.V1.980 N E W S ' '& ' L E T T E R S Page 9

A PHILOSOPHY OF TOTAL FREEDOM'

Sometimes when reading your paper, which can be very complex in the diver­sity of views "from below"—and in eru­dite Hegelian-Marxian philosophy—I search for a simplifying image or idea with which to attain some cohesion. This most compelling image or idea that dots your paper is "total freedom."

That space and concept is in need of rigorous and constant articulation; and for this I continue to value time spent reading News & Letters. Perhaps you are only at the beginnng of that "work" that will be required to bring the full­ness of that concept into human space.

Subscriber Staten Island, NY

* * * When reading a passage in Philoso­

phy and Revolution by Raya Dunayev-skaya I couldn't help but think of the Sand in i s t a s in Nicaragua and t h e FMLN in El Salvador. Dunayevskaya writes: "If there is finally to be 'release,' a plunge into freedom, it can come only through the overcoming of internal op­position. Each new unity of opposites reveals that the opposition is within." It makes me think of the contradictions within the freedom movements them­selves.

Latin American solidarity activist Chicago

* * * We keep seeing movements for free­

dom that somehow don't seem to make it, revolutions that "turn into their op­posite" as you put it. Does "absolute negativity" mean that we are continual­ly going to find out only what freedom is not?

Student * Chicago

Ever since the first N&L meeting I attended I felt one important point in N&L vs. other groups is that philosophy is not some electric good feature, one category out of many in your tool box. I sense imany have a category of theory, of activity, of followers. But there is ho sense anywhere else of philosophy as an all-encompassing element of what an or­ganization is.

Kaiser worker Oakland

Readers' Views ON THE TWO-WAY ROAD BETWEEN

THE U.S. AND AFRICA

WAR IN

THE

MIDDLE EAST? The biggest problem here, of course,

is the Israeli occupation and what it does to Palestinians and what happened to Israeli society, especially over the past 23 years, as a result of it. It's not that I don't care about problems in oth­er parts of the world. It 's the fact that my power is limited, and therefore I'd better to contribute to solving problems that are geographically closer to me. More so, because problems here are very bad. It's a time of crisis, and there's the feeling of a terrible, bloody, worse—than-ever-before war tha t is going to start.

Peace activist Israel

A CORRECTION There is a historical error on p. 12 of

the June issue. There was never a "par­tition of British-ruled Palestine into the states of Israel and Jordan." On May 15, 1946 Britain recognized the inde­pendence of Jordan (formerly called! Transjordan, i.e., the land East of the river) under King Abdullah. Only on Nov. 29, 1947 was the land west of the; Jordan river, i.e., Palestine proper, di­vided by UN Resolution 181 into a Jew­ish and Arab state, Israel and Palestine. Your writer's effort could play into the hands of right-wing Zionism, which for years has been pushing the line "Jordan is Palestine."

••—*.-«&*;— Middle Eas t activist Los Angeles

Editor's note: Thank- you for pointing out this error, which resulted from an edi­ting mistake: the sentence was meant to read "partition of British-ruled Palestine j n ^ israe\i[dp.d Palestinian states."

I don't know if Mandela's visit will change anything, but for the three days he's here it will bring us together. I've al­ways been proud to be Black, and I'm especially proud today. New Yorkers have to come together to find some com­mon ground. Look around you. It's not only Blacks who are here. You have peo­ple of all denominations.

Proud grandmother New York

* * * I am very disappointed that Mandela

didn't make it to Chicago. Some say he didn't want to come here because it would have built up Mayor Daley, who has done nothing for Black people. My view is, tha t ' s exactly why Mandela should have come. His visit could have galvanized attention on the racism oozing from this City's administration, its media, its whole way of life.

Anti-apartheid activist Chicago

* * * I was thinking about how awhile ago,

some white people would say to me, the ANC doesn't represent everyone—not all the Blacks in South Africa want sanc­tions because it make things harder for them. But now in the white media, sud­denly all you hear about is the ANC, not any of the other groups.

Mar tha Pennsylvania

* * * Sometimes a picture can tell 1,000

words. The half a dozen pictures you printed in your last issue from the Se-bokeng massacre in South African told many more. At a moment when everyone is awash with the illusion that Mandela's release means the end to the Hitlerite re­pression in that land, they told quite a different tale.

Reader Illinois

* * * In St. Louis, where I'm from, it's apar­

theid city. Blacks live on the north side and whites live on the south side. We have rallies all the time. This year they've been stronger than ever. Some white supremacist groups said if a Black ventured into their neighborhood after 10 p.m. it would be up to them about what to do. The NAACP showed up at the starting point from which they were going to patrol their area, and there was a confrontation. This same group sent a letter to my friend who works with Assist Resource Center, which helps minority-owned businesses. The letter was written with type cut out from the newspaper, threatening them. They have also gotten death-threat phone calls. Southeast Mis­souri has one of the strongest Ku Klux Klan chapters in the country.

L.C. St. Louis

* * * I think busing should be mandatory.

People in Bensonhurst are just living in their own neighborhood. I lived what happened there. I grew up and went to school in Park Slope, and I got chased home from school by whites. That was in about 1971. I don't know that it's worse now, but it seems that way because the media is picking it up more. There's more inner-city reporters, and they're not afraid to go out.

Black woman Brooklyn, NY

* # * Who in their right mind could even im­

agine that Winnie Mandela, who ap­peared in the U.S. in a new $l,000-plus gown for every occasion, can really be representing the interests of those poor in South Africa, those women in Soweto who stand at subway entrances selling tripe stew and fried bread, rain or shine? Whatever the rhetoric of "in the name of the toiling masses," it's all for their own good, to advance themselves. Perhaps that is why the Mandelas' big financial supporters are the Oprah Winfrey's, the Bob Browns' right-wing Black Republi­cans, the Kennedy's and their kind. If there was any good out of it all, it was that the events in New York give Blacks there something they are sorely in need of—folk heroes.

South African exile' < ! New York

The media reports of Mandela's visit here in Miami were distorted. Yes, there were some Cubans who demonstrated against Mandela, but there was a contro­versy within the Cuban community, and many Cuban exiles showed their support for Mandela and the Black struggle for freedom, against the anti-Mandela dem­onstrators.

Dominican revolut ionary Miami

CHINA ONE YEAR

LATER

I was involved in the democracy movement in Shanghai one year ago. It looked for a moment that we were going to overturn 40 years of dictator­ship. They then repressed everything. But the time-bomb of the people keeps ticking. There is no way to tell how many are really still in jail.

Chinese exile Wisconsin

* * * The fact that the students at Beijing

University protested the one-year anni­versary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square at the very same instant 100,000 marched in Hong Kong—with both filled with the signing of the "Internati­onale"—tells me the Chinese rulers haven't been able to kill the Idea of Freedom, for all their brutality of the past year. The Chinese youth will yet bring to the fore the banner of Marx's Humanism.

Chinese solidarity activist Chicago

* * * Capitalism is always trying to keep

workers and intellectuals separate. That is what was so great about the revolt in China last year—the workers and the intellectuals tried to work together to create something new. The massacres the government conducted were to break the back of that unity. The rulers fear a real revolution like the plague.

Autoworker 9 Los Angeles

CAPITALISM'S INHUMANITY Now that I've just been force-fed my

second crash course in how to use the new computer that sits on my desk at work, I think I finally understand what "artificial intelligence" means. It con­sists of the illusion that whoever uses a computer must be intelligent. The truth is the exact opposite. Personal comput­ers are now in great use precisely be­cause they do not require independent thought. They only require the ability to memorize a set of rules, like recipes for people who hate to cook. This is just the white collar version of what Marx described over 100 years ago when he said, "Instead of functifying la­bor, the machine robs it of all content."

Office worker Chicago

* * * A postscript to my report on the

British construction industry (Dec. 1989 N&L): The digging of the Channel Tun­nel has now cost the lives of seven workers—six on the British side. Capi­talism remains capable of amazing tech­nical achievements, and the tunnel will be a wonder of the modern world which will let you get on a train in London and get out in Paris. But as always, hu­man life is sacrificed on the altar of profit.

Richard Bunting Oxford, England

* * * While Bush strives to take away a

woman's right to terminate a pregnancy before her child is born, the federal government is at the very same time forcing every state to cut back drasti­cally on the one program designed to keep her children alive after they are born. This program is limited to those who are malnourished, yet fully one-third of all children born in the U.S>

' a re 'enrolled, which tells m e precisely-how severe poverty has become under, a

decade of economic restructuring. Be­cause food prices have risen so much faster t han other commodities, t he states are dropping children from the program as soon as they are one year old, and cutting by half the allotment of juice and cereal given to each infant who is still enrolled. What does it mean when "democratically" elected politi­cians in the richest land on earth con­sciously decide to starve one-third of the country's children?

J a n Kollwitz Chicago

* * * In t h e 1990's t h e crises h a v e n ' t

stopped; instead they have new ways of using goon squads to prop-up the sys­tem, as in Romania, where they call the workers who attacked the protestors "miners." As Marx said, the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing. '*

Felix Martin Los Angeles

AN INSULT TO FARM

WORKERS

As one who has worked with the Lat­in community in recent years, it was good to hear that Cesar Chavez was coming here to promote the UFW (United Farm Workers) grape boycott. Unfor tunate ly hardly anyone, even within the Left, ever found out he was in town. The media, big business, and the Church combined forces to make sure he knew he was not welcome here. It turns out that Jewel, one of the two major grocery chains which carries grapes in Chicago, called the TV sta* tions and papers and said it would pull its advertising if they carried the story. And the media went along!

In addition, when the UFW called churches to mobilize support, many priests and nuns indicated they would need first to submit requests to the Ar­chdiocese to participate and one nun even said she could not participate in a demonstration without a decree from Rome! But, the real slap in the face came when no church that was contact­ed would even give Cesar a bed to sleep in during his short two-day stay here. He wound up staying with a former priest who works very closely with His-panics throughout Illinois.

E r i ca Rae ^ Chicago

CAMPUS ACTIVISM Now approaching my mid-50's, and as

a veteran activist of the Peace-Civil and Human Rights movements who recently graduated from my State University, I can attest to the "apathy and disunity" identified by Anthony Thompson of New York University (see March N&L "Readers Views"), which was comment­ed on by a Black woman activist in your April issue. However, I can also report that even on this predominantly white campus in Northern New Eng­land, there has been a lessening of this1

apathy and disunity, evident in a re­newed interest in the campus' minority-student affairs. I was disturbed by the April response, that suggested the only significant leverage minorities have to­day to move the establ ishment to change is rioting.

New reader _ Portland, Maine

OUR READERS RESPOND I am very pleased to read N&L these

days. You are doing a splendid job of , keeping Raya's work-thoughts-philoso­phy alive. Keep up your fine work.

Gloria Joseph St. Croix, Virgin Islands

* * *

I just read the Jan./Feb. issue of News & Let ters with Peter Wermuth's essay on Lukacs and Dunayevskaya. It 's good to read a paper that has some the­ory in it, and not just dogma.

Environmental activist Berkeley,

* * *

This is definitely the "workers' pa­per" as well as the "peoples' paper" and a thinker's paper. I am proud to con­tribute to it in any way I can.

'"*. ' . ' '•.• :: •: .:'•:;:::.• ', ' ^ W P P P ? ^ -w< t . : J I I ! - . ' \"i ,, r : ••; LosiAngeles

New York mass outpouring for Nelson Mandela New York, NY—So overwhelming was the out­

pouring of New Yorkers to greet Nelson and Winnie Mandela on the day of their arrival here that Mandela, visibly moved, began his speech at City Hall by saying he had seen nothing like this anywhere else on their tour. Over three-quarters of a million people came out to cheer the Mandelas that first day, which included a visit to Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn and a ticker-tape parade down Broadway.

Another 200,000 people, most of them Afro-Ameri­cans, jammed the streets of Harlem at a rally the next afternoon, while a huge crowd also filled Yankee Stadi­um. Surely the organizers' fears that the parade, Har­lem rally and Yankee Stadium event would be overkill turned into awe at the size and radiance of these out­pourings of support and identification with the South African freedom struggle.

"We had to come," one Black woman told me as we stood waiting for the Mandelas to come up Broadway. "We came up on the train from Philadelphia. I took the day off from work, and I never considered not coming. I can't remember a day so important to me. African peo­ple all over the world should unite and support each other." fflSTORY-IN-THE-MAKING

People waiting for the Mandelas to arrive packed the sidewalks of Broadway for several hours. Afro-Ameri­cans of all ages and walks of life, Latinos, Asians, whites and many others talked and joked with each other in a way rarely found in New York.

A young Black woman called the Harlem rally "histo­ry in the making," because "it's evident that we can all

be together as a people without any problems. I hope that just because he's here now and then leaving, this positive movement won't stop here."

A young white participant in the parade told me that her friends couldn't understand why she wanted to go through all the trouble of going to it. "I said, this man has been in prison my entire life, for freedom. I'm 22 years old. I had to see him."

What dominated the parade was the tremendous feel­ing of Afro-American pride and self-determination that filled the air. Yet at the same time it sparked a multi­tude of expressions of solidarity with other oppressed groups. One man described how, "When a group of American Indians walked down the street, a swell of

Black/Red View Race, sex and censorship b y J o h n A l a n

Both sides in the dispute now brewing over the ban­k i n g of the 2 Live Crew rap album "As Nasty As they Wanna Be" by a federal judge in Florida are in agree­ment that the album is "crude and obscene." This "agreement" is another way of saying that each side un­derstands that the legal issue involved is one of a com­munity's moral standards versus the constitutional right of free speech.

But in the opinion of this columnist the issue goes far beyond the legal question of obscenity and the hypocrit ical moral i ty of religious fundamental ism and even beyond the bias of race, which has clouded this issue to a degree. It contains the concrete issue of the relationship of men to women in a regressive society tha t is now ideologically and objectively chal­lenging the humani ty of women.

Thus, I don't believe that we can separate the attacks on a woman's right to have an abortion from the de­grading obscenities directed toward women. In both in­stances women's minds and bodies are expropriated by external forces. I hasten to say that this has nothing to do with Black ethos, but much to do with the self-alien­ating character of American culture.

R E T R O G R E S S I V E T A N G L E Initially I was going to ignore the 2 Live Crew Story

altogether for the same reasons I thought that it was necessary to stay clear of Andrew Dice Clay's degrading jokes about women.

However, I changed my mind after I was invited to the premier showing of "Rap City Rhapsody," a docu­mentary film on rap by Akili Buchannan. The Black producer of that film did a great job in depicting rap in all of its forms, from "put down rap," to "political rap," to "sexual rap," to "women rap" and "white rap." With­out a voice-over narration, he showed that today's rap

, originated within the realities of the Black urban ghet-toes as a cultural expression of the alienated seeking their own identity.

At the end of the film there was a question and an­swer period during which a non-middle class Black woman took the floor and wanted to know "why do some r appe r s put down women so hard?" This ques­tion did not elicit a precise answer from either the producer or from the rappers that were in the audience. I t was dealt with, as in the film, within the context of the problem of distribution, i.e., the market place.

This concern with the marke t place is coupled with the fact that corporat ions are now producing and dis­tributing rap records. And in the parlance of the trade "As Nasty As They Wanna Be" is a cross over album, meaning that it is purchased by as many whites as Blacks. This has an unsuspected philosophic dimension, which was materialized in the Black woman's question, "Why do some rappers put down women so hard?"

P H I L O S O P H I C Q U E S T I O N S Many rappers are eager to commercialize themselves,

that is, to find their "other" in the dominant culture from which they were estranged, and not in a concept of new human social relations.

No culture is an independent entity. The dominant culture in the United States is grounded in commodity production. Thus, it is a reflection of the self-alienation

" • o f our economic life which is rooted in alienated labor. Marx, in his 1844 Humanist Essays, pointed out that the degree of degradation in capitalist society was ex­pressed in the "relationship of man to woman," and that "from this relationship the whole cultural level of man can be judged." « The popular* culture, of .thisAq&iihtry,_ as .well as. the

; , ' t ^'dejtached" elite, culture, is shot through and through

with class, race and sex antagonisms. Contrary to popu­lar belief, "counter-culture" doesn't escape these antag­onism; it could only do so if it were able to transcend the reason for its own existence.

Black intellectuals perform a disservice when they explain Black American counter-culture simply in t e rms of unmediated African tradit ions, as if Black America isn' t a t the hear t of American Civilization and all of i ts historic and continuing cultural contra­dictions.

The 2 Live Crew case has evoked false concepts about "Black American culture." A number of white and Black intellectuals rushed into print to explain them in terms of some secret Black culture with tradi­tional African connections. How on earth would they explain Andrew Dice Clay?

Regardless of their motives, these intellectuals leave out the very source from which the dynamics of Black American culture flow—the sharp contradiction be­tween the American ideal of freedom and the inequality of Black and white relationships in this country. This is the reality of American civilization. And out of this du­alism Black American culture was born, with its Afri­can roots and all.

Black culture has never been hidden in this country; it has been contested, imitated and commercialized. But its inimitable substance has to transcend its duality.

Black World (cont inued from p a g e 1)

by Black and white politicians, Black America's con­sciousness of its historic self-determination is once again becoming a powerful force in American life. Thus, the Black mass outpouring for Nelson Mandela is neither a return to the politics of the old, nor mere adulation. What Black America sees in Mandela is simply itself, the tenacity of its interminable struggles for freedom, its own unbroken spirit of resistance, its personification of the Black dimension as revolutionary and ongoing.

How else are we to explain the phenomenon of Black Americans viewing their own mass outpouring for Mandela—in Harlem, Roxbury, Detroit, and Oakland— as a desire to participate in "history-in-the-making," clutching their children to them because they want them to be a part of that history. What is this "histo­ry," if not the sense of a deep indwelling revolution in the way Black thought comprehends its own experience and that of the actual revolution in South African socie­ty as inseparable.

Thus, for one historic moment, the consciousness of the Black masses broke through the barr iers be­hind which Black bourgeois politics have confined its self-determination and stretched out a revolutionary hand of solidarity to the freedom Idea, as well as the freedom struggle in South Africa. By the historical breadth and passion of the Black mass outpouring, Black folk in rally after rally for Mandela have in the most elemental way demonstrated their recogni­tion of the Idea of freedom as a great force of Rea­son in the life and death struggle against racism.

What has come to light is that it is this indwelling revolution in Black thought as well as the actual strug­gles for self-determination which are as much the es­sence of Black reality as its myriad social crises. QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES

What has come to light, as well, is the illusion of the collapse of America's social .divisions. .The .wealthy .anej

cheers rose from the crowd, and thousands of fists were raised in an expression of solidarity. The crowd also ap­plauded' groups representing Palestinians, Salvadorans, and others striving for freedom."

However, it was the beacon of freedom the Mandelas represented that brought people out in such numbers. Some of the biggest cheers at the Harlem rally came as Nelson Mandela called out the names of Afro-American heroes such as Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

'SOUTH AFRICA IS WORSE, BUT WE'RE HERE'

One woman said, "Things are much worse in South Africa, but it's really a matter of degree. After so much struggle we're just here." There is no question that re­cent—and even not so recent—events involving racism in New York drew people into the streets along with their solidarity with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

A woman who lived near Harlem talked about going downtown to Fifth Avenue, and being stared at. "People look at me like I don't belong, like I'm going to steal something. They don't think Black people can have money?"

No one expected that the day after the Mandelas' vis­it New York would be miraculously different. But many people are talking about what these remarkable events may mean for the future, because no one who was there will forget such passion for freedom.

—Laurie Cashdan

Black prisoner speaks I have been caged for seven years, five of thern have)

been confined to this "camp." The other two years I| was held in the "camps" of Cook County.

I have many concerns as to what goes on here, but the one concern that troubles me the most is the failurel of my fellows to see the need to unite and address our) problems together. There's no doubt in my mind that the oldest control technique in the world (divide andl conquer) has played the key role in assuring that we never unite.

Pr isop officials use leaders to keep their "people in| check."1 When a brother begins to arouse conscious' ness, hfi'a immediately suppressed. The puppet-mas­te r activates the puppet and the brother usually ends up physically shut up. If the brother who's arousing consciousness happens to be a leader, he 's t rans­ferred all over the state.

I personally have just begun to develop a political consciousness (four years ago). I'm still in the pro­cess of learning. I got tired of hearing how rich and powerful this country is when you have millions of peo­ple who have no food, or table to put it on. 1 got tired of a handful of people running the world. I'm tired of] hvprocrisy being confused for democracy. I'm tired ofj this country's Kapilalism and its imperialism, and don't want to be a part of it.

I feel that the end is near lor this country's murder­ous system, and there has to be an effective system to replace it. So I'm studying socialism and communism. If] all of that constitutes a rise in political consciousness. then I'm on the rise. , . .

—inmate rising

powerful who appeared alongside Mandela did nothing to support sanctions and even, as in the case of George Bush, vigorously opposed sanctions. And surely there was no greater show of fraudulent moral indignation than that expressed by the white American media at Mandela's adherence to the principle of armed struggle or his refusal to condemn Castro.

Although it in no way lessens the need to criticize the lack Of revolut ionary democracy and the serious racial problems in Castro 's Cuba, lest the imperialist West forgets: it was wi th the military support pro­vided by Cast ro to Angola tha t apartheid South Afri­ca was defeated for the first time, at Cuito Cuana-vale in 1988, a historic event which led to South Af­r ica 's present readiness to seek a political settlement.

If the Black masses are to oppose the oppressive apartheid system, that the Western media and politi­cians "morally condemn," with what weapons would the West have the masses fight except those left to them? The real question is whether apartheid South Africa can be fundamentally transformed into the truly human society envisioned by the Black masses with the self-limiting principle, "one person, one vote."

Unseparated from that question is the one that we in the American anti-apartheid movement are faced with, namely: what happens after Mandela's tour? Ironically, Mandela's single unvarying message—which as it turned out was the only unvarying one since many of his previ­ous views underwent significant revision during his American tour—i.e., keep the sanctions pressure on, is the one issue that has led to the present impasse in the anti-apartheid movement.

So single-issue oriented has the movement become that the "success" of divestment long ago left the move­ment without a mass base in the Black community. As long as the anti-apartheid movement fights South Afri­can apartheid, shy of the Black community .a«d-it*-ftghr/ against "American apartheid," Mandela's trip will have given nq renewed impetus to .the movement. The con­cept of the two-way road to revolution between Africa and Amftrica has assumed a life of its own with Mande­la's, historic -tour' of America, the challenge teffo ntatke.it the printfiple of a new anti-apartheid movement. '.••.* .'.*

JULY, 4fl©0 N.EWS .& B E T T E R S Rage ,41

Youth Homeless youth in America by Sheila Fuller

"I was 12 years old when I got kicked out of the house. Try to imagine yourself with no money, no clothes on your back. You don't know when your next meal will be. For two years, I slept behind a building and faced cops who harass and abuse you because you are like a toy to them. Then there is hustling and pros­titution, the ultimate form of income. And you run into counselors who sexually harass and abuse you. Imagine what you'd be like if you felt no one cared about you; if you felt no one cared that there is a person inside you."

These are the words of a 20-year-old youth who has been homeless for six years. He is one of over a million homeless youth in the U.S. today. Many have left abu­sive homes or foster homes and are now forced to live on the streets,—alleys, and under train tracks. Many re­main on the streets because state shelters will not allow youth under 18 years of age to enter without parental consent or state custody. Those who do get into youth shelters find themselves living in overcrowded condi­tions and are forced to leave shelters after 30 days if they do not find a job, or do not attend school full time. The reality that they face is sexual exploitation, drugs and abuse.

For homeless children, the conditions of life are as horrendous, if not worse. After a decade of Reaganism and its continuation by Bush, today children are the poorest age group in the U.S. One out of every two Black or Latino children is poor and malnourished, and 15% of all homeless people are children. They live with their homeless families or they are sent to foster homes. They are treated inhumanly by courts which force them to stay in abusive homes. Or they are taken away from some foster parents who may love them, and are forced to return to an abusive parent. So alienated have hu­man relationships in this society become that children have become objects to use and abuse and discard.

A HOMELESS YOUTH'S WORKING DAY This mistreatment of youth and specifically homeless

youth and children is intensifying daily both within families and at work. One homeless youth from Oklaho­ma told me: "I used to be a welder in a concrete facto­ry. There we constantly coughed up the concrete dust that was thick in the air. I left that job to work for a travelling sales company. But they hired me and strand­ed me in Chicago. They hire you as an 'independent contractor,' not as an employee. They offer you 'adven­ture and travel across the U.S.' with a 'set salary.' But in reality they make you work long hours and pay you $5 a day for food, and no pay check. They get you so far from home that you can't do anything but what they say. They monitor your off days; force you to get up at 6 a.m. and not go anywhere unless a manager ac­companies you. They wouldn't let you watch T.V. or read newspapers because that is 'negative thinking.' The sales company told me I had to sell nine bottles of their cleaning fluid every day. But I worked hard and could only sell five. Then they kicked me out. Now I know that this wasn't just my experience. There are many other companies like this. And that is how some youth become homeless."

MARX ON PAUPERISM & CAPITALIST PRODUCTION

To me, the working conditions of this youth are noth­ing but slave labor. And far from being an exception, it

Youth in Revolt by Franklin Dmitryev

Hundreds of students at the Univ. of Zambia were joined by children, workers and other Lusaka residents in four days of revolt sparked by a doubling of the price of corn meal, a staple there. On June 27, police tear-gassed and shot demonstrators, killing dozens. The next morning at 4 a.m., they raided and closed the universi­ty, arresting 34 protest leaders, beating students and forcing 5,000 off the campus. Pres. Kaunda tried to ap­pease the population by promising a referendum on whether to allow multi-party elections, but has not budged on the price of corn meal. As we go to press, crowds have come out in Lusaka to celebrate a coup at­tempt against Kaunda.

* * * International students at Howard University in Wash­

ington, D.C., have been holding rallies over Congress's plan to impose a 50% tuition surcharge on new Howard students from abroad. Howard, a historically Black col­lege, educates many students from Africa and the Car­ibbean. The plan would also apply to Gallaudet, the pre-eminent university for the hearing-impaired. No other college in the U.S. imposes such a surcharge.

* * * Thousands of East German students held a nation­

wide strike June 7, demanding bigger stipends. In East Berlin, protestors held a sit-in outside the Parliament. One group scraped together $119, which they sent to Prime Minister Maiziere, asking him to try living on it for a month. After the July 1 German economic union, East German students are to receive $119 a month, one quarter the amount paid to West German students.

* * * In June, Michigan State University tore down five

shanties built in People's Park by students to raise awareness on issues from racism to the U.S. role in El Salvador, and from homelessness to the Palestinian inti­fada. Five students were arrested for "camping," al­though the students say the administration had agreed to.allQw.the shanties to remain until classes resume in the fall. , , ; , , , ,

is more and more the reality for youth today. It is this state of utter poverty and inhumanity that Karl Marx discerned over 100 years ago as the very drive and di­rection of capitalist production. "It is characterized by a maximum of working time and a minimum of wages—Fi­nally the lowest sediment of the relative surplus popula­tion dwells in the sphere of pauperism...along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capi­talist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth: I t forms the faux frais [incidental expenses] of capitalist production."*

Today's homeless youth are crying out against this inhuman reality. Whether they have run away from home, or live with their homeless families, or suddenly lost their job and landed on the street, homeless youth want a totally different kind of life in which they can have choices and run their own lives and develop all their talents. * Capital, Volume I. Vintage edition, pp. 796-797.

Protests against Bush's lies Chicago, III.—On June 7, about 50 people headed

for a swanky downtown hotel in a lively protest against Pres. Bush, who was there on a campaign visit. While 150 other marchers were allowed right in front of the hotel, protesting Bush's lip service towards the Baltic independence movements, our group, consisting mainly of AIDS and Central America solidarity activists, was forced to stay across the street. Some demonstrators at­tributed this to police homophobia.

Neither the police line nor the pouring rain could dampen our spirits, as we chanted, "Health care, not wealth care!" "Human r ights are under at tack—what do we do? Act up, fight back!" and many other chants highlighting the 300,000 dead of AIDS in the U.S. as well as the ferocious repression in El Salva­dor tha t has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Meanwhile, Bush's little party for the rich was dis­rupted not once but twice, by several people who screamed denunciations of his deadly, inhuman policies that prop up El Salvador's death-squad government while allowing AIDS victims to die. As soon as they were dragged out by goons, Bush regained his compo­sure and arrogantly brayed, "I love Illinois—it's so live­ly here."

Of course the news just played Bush's answers, with­out explaining that they were shameless lies. And our protest was invisible to them, though the Baltic-Ameri­cans did at least get mentioned. Our anger and energy may not have made the news that day, but the AIDS conference in San Francisco later in the month showed that it is boiling over and will not be silenced.

—Participant

Education:

Bureaucratic or creative? DeKalb, III.—A widely accepted goal of education

is that it results in the emergence of a good democratic citizen. Why then isn't there democratic education? Stu­dents are treated as if they do not have minds; they are not active participants in the learning process, and there is no, or little, exchange of ideas. How often have you felt that you were a glass and the teacher was a pitcher pouring you full of facts only to be sucked out again?

The educational philosophy most dominant in the schools today is Realism in which teachers are precise, business-like explainers of the world, providing for the mastering of facts and information. This type of envi­ronment does not let students actively learn, as we have all witnessed. Although Plato's Idealism would have a school environment conducive to ideas and the subject matter being that of the mind, it has the tendency to move in the direction of rule by the elite, negating the * democratic value of people. It offers heroes for imitation and teachers as models, which again does not allow stu­dents free development of the self. Another philosophy, Experimentalism, comes closest to what I believe should be dominant in schools, if they are to exist as the insti­tutions they are today. Experimentalism focuses on hu­man experience. The learning theory states that humans learn best by doing (activity) and undergoing (mental process). Lessons include questions to facilitate thinking and provide for inquiry, where the teacher is a research project director. Experimentalism is not the solution, but if some teachers adopted the philosophy, some of the boredom and frustation may be alleviated.

Schools stifle creativity, label and separate students, take away freedom (closing campus, censoring newspa­pers, etc.) and are alienating in nature. They tend to unequally distribute the benefits of education and repro­duce the stratification that already exists. Students are at the lowest rung in a school's hierarchy. Teachers, with mainly women (the "mother figure" in the primary grades) and more men in the higher grades (more mon­ey), are on the next rung, with the aclministrators at the top. If schools are for the students, something is defi­nitely wrong with this ladder. Let the students have # voice and educate the educators!

— F u t u r e t e ache r

"Every emancipation consists of lead­ing the human world and human rel­ationships back to humanity itself."

—Karl Marx

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Pagfe 12 N E W S & L E T T E R 3 JULY, 1990

Our Life and Times b y K e v i n A . B a r r y a n d M a r y H o l m e s

Editor's note: We received the following from a corre­spondent in Toronto, Ontario.

Brian Mulroney's constitutional house of cards has come tumbling down following the failure to have all ten provincial legislatures ratify the Meech Lake Accord and its so-called "Companion Resolution" by the June 23 deadline. Nothing could be more fitting to end one of the most bizarre periods in Canadian history than hav­ing the death blow to this ill-conceived process deliv­ered by Canada's bitterly oppressed and just as bitterly defiant Native peoples.

Billed as the round of constitutional development that would bring Quebec into the Canadian Constitu­tional "family" (Quebec alone failed to ratify the 1982 Constitution, although technically is nonetheless subject to its authority) by agreeing to its five "conditions," the

* major of which is the recognition of Quebec as a "dis­tinct society," the Meech Lake Accord was badly flawed both in process and in content.

It drew the ire of Aboriginal peoples, women, Canadi­ans of other than English or French origins, and resi­dents of the two northern territories—all of whom are no longer content to sit around and wait—for its failure to enshrine their rights into the Constitution. The Ac­cord reflected Mulroney's vision of a regressively decen­tralized, privatized Canada, and was perceived by most progressive-minded Canadians as a further threat to Canada's already besieged national health, social and environmental programs.

The Meech Lake deal was struck behind closed doors in 1987 by 11 men (Mulroney and the ten provincial premiers) with zero public participation. Over the next three years it was passed by seven provincial legisla­tures. When by the spring of 1990 it looked as if two of the three "hold out" provinces, where new governments had replaced the original Meech signatories, were seri­ous about not adopting the Accord, Mulroney called to-

Death of Canada's Meech Lake Accord gether all premiers and literally locked them up for sev­en days—again behind closed doors, again no public participation—to hammer out a "compromise" via the Companion Resolution, which promised to address un­met concerns (rights, Senate reform) in future constitu­tional negotiations.

At this meeting the two most anti-Meech premiers, Wells of Newfoundland and Filmon of Manitoba, were in effect brow-beaten into agreeing—for the sake of "na­tional unity"—to hold their noses and allow the Accord to be passed by their legislatures.

Enter Elijah Harper, a Cree Indian, who is the only Native in the Manitoba Legislature. With the June 23 deadline rapidly nearing, Harper used procedural tactics to single-handedly prevent the legislature from enacting Meech Lake before the deadline. He was fully support­ed by the Assembly of First Nations, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, and other Native groups.

Harper became an overnight hero to Native people and others across Canada. He was cheered even by his fellow Manitoba legislators, who were pleased that they would not have to vote for the Accord. And Newfound­land, seeing the writing on the wall, didn't even bother to take a vote.

The defeat of the Meech Lake Accord represents a great victory, especially for Canada's Aboriginal peoples, who seized a moment in history and changed its course. The treatment of Native peoples in Canada is a nation­al disgrace and has been compared to apartheid in South Africa. It is characterized by inhumane living conditions on reservations; chronic poverty and alcohol­ism in urban centres; broken treaties and promises; dis­respect for and destruction of Native religion, culture, and language and the confiscation of Native land and natural resources.

After five years of discussion that ended in 1987, in­cluding four First Ministers' Conferences, only five of

the ten provinces could agree on self-government for Aboriginal peoples. The hastily construed Meech Lake "Companion Resolution" called for a Conference on Na­tive rights every three years. In the last days, as the clock wound down toward the Meech Lake deadline, the government of Canada went into a state of panic char­acterized by lies, deceit and threats. Native people and their leaders, on the other hand, gave all of Canada a lesson in courage, honour and humility. They did not succumb to last minute deals or promises that they knew would not be kept. When summoned to meet with the Prime Minister, they announced they had estab­lished their position, would not negotiate, but would at­tend and "listen politely."

In the aftermath of Meech Lake's demise, questions are raised that go far beyond the issue of formal consti­tutional reform. Even the Liberals recognize the appall­ing lack of public participation, and the supposed-to-be-socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) has half-heart­edly called for Mulroney's resignation and are proposing a "constituent assembly." Both of these federal opposi­tion parties had joined Mulroney in supporting Meech Lake.

The past year's intense debate over Meech Lake has brought the dormant issue of Quebec separation back onto the front burner. In English Canada it spawned new expressions of anti-French racism. In Quebec, sepa­ration in the 1990s appears to wear a decidedly more conservative face than it did in the 1960s and 1970s. It is gaining support within the corporate business sector as well as within the governing Liberal Party. As for the separatist Parti Quebecois, who proved while in power that they could be as anti-labour as the Liberals, little is heard any more of a socialist independent Que­bec. Nonetheless, the passion for self-determination amongst the masses in Quebec is now stronger than ever.

Chinese student protests remember massacre Fundamentalism in Algeria Despite the Chinese rulers' military clampdown, ideo­

logical bombardment, jailings and actual executions in the weeks before June 3-4, students at Beijing Universi­ty marked the anniversary of last year's massacres by initiating a rally around 11 p.m., June 3—close to the time last year that soldiers and tanks started to kill demonstrators in the city's western outskirts.

Students began to shout and blow whistles, throw bricks, bottles and old bicycle tires at the police ringing the dormitories. As others poured out and joined a pro­cession, it grew to at least 1,000 students who marched singing the "Internationale." When campus authorities warned them to stop the protest, the students booed and reavowed last year's continuing struggle for free­dom.

As one bold student began making a speech and de-

Devastation in Iran A catastrophic earthquake hit the Gilan and Zanjan

provinces in the Caspian Sea area of Iran on June 21. Tens of thousands died, while mountains crumbled and many villages were buried under the rubble. The earth

« shook hundreds of times during the next three days. Even before the mountains stopped crumbling, the

avalanche of lies began to pour out of the mouths of the Iranian rulers. Iran's president called the earth­quake a "divine test." People of Iran know what he means by this characterization. It means the "vengeance of God poured upon a sacrilegious people." This "divine test" comment was followed by resurfacing of the divi­sions within the rulers.

One editorial wrote of how even while buried un-* der the rubble people were calling for "death to

America!" This kind of insane posturing has brought havoc and destruction to much of Iran ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was taken over by Kho­meini and his followers. It cannot hide the fact that they, as well as other rulers, have brought the whole Middle East today to the brink of mass slaughter, with chemical arms and other sophisticated weapon­ry. Meanwhile housing and conditions of life are de­teriorating. Apparently, they all have no intention of turning away from the catastrophic direction they are heading in, in the Middle East.

What we also have to remember, however, is that June, 1990, was the 70th anniversary of the Gilan Re-

*. public, the first established socialist republic in the Middle East following the Russian Revolution. It lasted over 16 months. The Gilan Republic, born out of the struggles that arose in the 1906-11 revolution, saw the emergence of peasant and anjumans (soviets) through­out the whole region. The history of Gilan did not stop in the 1920s.

During the 1960s and 1970s it was the place where armed opposition to the Shah emerged. In the 1980s the resistance to the Islamic republic never stopped in Gi­lan. There, shoras (soviets) were the most radical and the ones that lasted far into the decade. As late as last year the government press still reported on the conti-

aa*nued existence of clandestine factory shoras in the north.

The tumult in the Central Asian republics of Russia today has created a new context for the struggles of the people of northern Iran. In grieving along with the vic­tims of the earthquake, we also declare our solidarity with their aim of rebuilding their society on totally new,

** human foundations. —Cyrus Noveen

—David Anderson, News & Letters photo

Demonstrators in Chicago, and many other cities around the U.S., rallied June 3 in support of Chi­nese freedom fighters.

nouncing the rulers, whom the Chinese now derisively call the "gang of elders," he was hustled away by the police. The students ended the rally in a few hours, but the next night continued to smash bottles in protest—a direct attack on Deng Xiaoping whose given name sounds like the word for "small bottle."

One student said defiantly, "We are not afraid. People have a right to express their aspirations for democracy."

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Islamic fundamentalists who ran in local Algerian elections on June 12 defeated the one-party rule by the National Liberation Front (FLN) which has ruled Alge­ria since winning independence from France in 1962. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) received between 55-70% of the vote, gaining control of the main cities in­cluding the capital, Algiers.

The FIS rose to prominence on the same tide of dis­mal conditions that gave rise to the riots which rocked Algeria in 1988, forcing the FLN to allow multi-party elections. Economic decay has hit the youth especially hard. Well over 20% of young men are jobless. They are now called the "hitiste," literally "those who hold up the walls," since they have been reduced to idle days of leaning against the city's walls.

The FLN put forth a program of economic "re­forms" which entailed dismantling the major state-owned industries, and "privatizing" other areas in­cluding urban real estate and rural collectives. The government is now paying out $7 billion yearly sim­ply to service its $25 billion foreign debt. The FIS did not run on an economic program as such. Instead, it put up the slogan, "Islam, the only solution," as the way to "inspire" the people to greater "productivi­ty."

The main platform of the FIS is to institutionalize Is­lamic law in Algeria. Women's groups are expressing grave concerns about the growth of fundamentalism in a society in which women took a crucial role in winning independence. Already, religious leaders are blaming working women for the high rate of unemployment, say­ing they have stolen jobs from the men. There have -al­ready been a number of marches against the FIS in Algeria.

New upsurge in Zaire Strikes and demonstrations against the Mobutu gov­

ernment have erupted in the wake of a massacre of stu­dent protesters at the National University of Zaire at Lubumbashi (UNZL). Most reports that have reached the outside agree that during the night of May 12, a contingent of Mobutu's elite personal guard invaded the campus, telling civil police to leave, and then cutting off electric power.

In the dark, they then murdered dozens of students, many foy cutting their throats. A number of the bodies were then reportedly burned in mass graves. Estimates of the number of students killed range from 50 to 100 people.

The [butcher commandos were supposedly retaliating against students who had earlier demonstrated against Mobutu and had attacked police informers on the cam­pus. UNZL students have said that police agents had apprehended and likely murdered at least 23 other stu­dents in recent years.

Students in Lusaka, Zambia, demonstrated in soli­darity with the UNZL students, a number of whom have sought political asylum in Zambia. Schools were closed as high school and elementary students joined the protest inarches. Teachers and doctors went on strike for higher wages, and against the Mobutu government. _. ^__—

Most significantly, strikes shut down the state-owned copper mines, Gecamines, the country's largest enter­prise. Mobutu has disclaimed any part in the massacre. Instead, he has charged provincial and local police, cam­pus and party officials who are taking the-rap, with jail, terms.-